From the perspective of the human drama, life appears to offer opportunities: if they are grabbed, we are successful. If they are not, we are not. This has all the drama of the Las Vegas roulette wheel or the Guy de Maupassant short story. There are big opportunities, and there are small opportunities. If it appears big, it's big. If it appears small, it's small. If it slips through my fingers for reasons out of my control, it was never my opportunity in the first place. If I miss my bus, I haven't, because it wasn't my bus. The next bus is my bus. If the reason for taking or missing the opportunity was my decision, it's by no means certain that boldness is divine or hesitation, a lack of faith. Sometimes boldness is recklessness and hesitation, sense. In that case, it wasn't an opportunity, it was a trap. Both look shiny.
From this perspective, there is one known reality, seen only in the rear-view mirror, plus an infinite array of other, lost possibilities: 'Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden.' (T. S. Eliot). It's tempting to be bewitched by what never was and to try to take the blame, as though we're prime causal forces. Believing oneself to have that much power is arguably idolatry.
From God's point of view, perhaps, every moment offers me an opportunity, either to do God's will or to act based on self. Looking at content rather than form, there is only ever one opportunity, namely to do God's will, with far less distinction in magnitude. The material missed opportunities, I suspect, are not the failure to take up that job offer in Caracas or the other apparent major turning points of life. I suspect it's the small, constantly recurring missed opportunities that are the key ones. The failures to show kindness or keep my big fat mouth shut. I once asked someone whether to go on a major trip, and he replied that God would be there if I went and at home if I stayed, so God's will would be done either way, and I'd be fine either way. I went. But I might equally have stayed.
You see, I will worry about the apparently big external things. But the second morning remembrance says: 'Rak hishshamer lekha ushemor nafshekha me'od' ('Only guard yourself and guard your living soul greatly.') The problem does not lie out there, but inside: am I recalling constantly what God has done and revealed? If that opportunity is taken up, all other opportunities seem to fall into place.
If everything is in God's hands, the outcome is certain. The question concerns only the route and how much resistance I'm going to put up before I get there. In the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, Father Makarios fights the devil and wins, then continues by fighting God in the hope that he'll eventually lose. That's the only real test going on. When kids go bowling, the parents sometimes station balloons for the balls to bounce off to stop them from going in the gutters, so that every bowl is a win. From the kids' point of view, it might look as though it's about winning. From the parents' point view, the aim is for the kids to connect with each other. The real purpose is not the ostensible purpose.
As the other Eliot, (George,) said: 'The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.'