The Chaos in my Plan

When I was around eight or nine I sat down and made my life plan. I was going to get married, have six children, five boys and one girl and give birth to my first child before I was 22. I was going to have a happy life filled with adventure, laughter, love, and perfection. I didn’t plan my wedding. I planned my fiftieth wedding anniversary.

I am forty four years old. I have three amazing children, two girls and a boy, and I did not make it to my fiftieth wedding anniversary, in fact. I didn’t even make it to 20.

My plan for my own life fell apart, that is not to say that my life has been a failure. Quite the contrary, despite the extreme struggles that I have gone through, my life is in a wonderful place. My children are grown, or almost grown, and they are outstanding!

I had a great plan, my goals were good goals, my hopes were good hopes, my dreams were good dreams, I had carefully laid them out and created a wonderful story that made me smile to imagine.

However, my plan has long since been replaced with a sometimes-harsh reality.
My plan.
But not God’s.

You see, my life is part of a much bigger, much better, and much more incredible story than I could ever fathom. God has woven the character that is me into a beautiful tapestry and it is a story that He slowly reveals to me as I let go of the pieces of my plan that don’t fit into His.

Sometimes this hurts, sometimes it hurts so badly I can barely breathe, but if I am to say I truly trust God with my life, that means that each piece of the story I wrote for myself that doesn’t fit into His plan must be turned over to Him. Faith means trusting that even the scary and painful parts of God’s plan are for my benefit.

As I pause to look back over my life, I can see that although I’ve been through some really tough times, as I reflect on those times I know that already God has brought good out of the chaos, growth out of the pain, and hope out of a time of hopelessness.  He took what was painful and added undeserved blessing, blessings that gave me the strength not to quit.

We all go through times in our lives that are difficult or downright awful, and we all go through times that are joyful and filled with beauty. The tapestry of your life looks chaotic and confusing, but keep going, keep trusting, keep letting go of your plans and cling to the knowledge that the plan that God has for your life is more beautiful than you can imagine.

 

Please follow and like us: