plans

This post was written on December 23rd. Since then the Lord has continually showed me the blessings that come from trust in who he is and what his plans are for me.

Isn’t it funny how God’s plans are never our own? We envision our entire future our whole lives- our future job, home, husband. Yet, with a snap of your fingers that can change. That will change. When that happens, I won’t beat around the bush, it stinks. It just does. There is nothing easy about change. Even good change is hard if it is real, genuine change. It requires that we challenge the comfortable, what we are used to, our plans. I had to confront this head on this week. I have had my life pretty planned out for the past 3 years, and, all of the sudden, God changed that. At first, I was so incredibly angry. I sat in my car, and I did something I have never done: I screamed in bubbling anger at what God was “doing to me.” As it turns out, it is what God was doing for me that I was missing. I was happy with my plans. My plans made me comfortable. My plans gave me a future that I knew step for step. There was zero question of what I would do or who I would be with. Snap. That is all different now. When my anger passed, I was completely overcome with a sadness I have never felt- true, painful, heartbreak. My heart was utterly and completely crushed by the weight of what obedience to God meant. I say this without exaggeration, I have never felt such heavy and painful sadness thus far in my life. My mind churned with thoughts of what this change meant for me and my family, questions about my future, questions about God’s goodness, questions about why, and on and on. Finally, I collapsed. I let the weight crush me. It wasn’t until then, in that weakened state, that I felt the Lord’s strength. I sat on my bathroom floor and wept to God. I wept with God. The first step in healing or progress of any kind as a believer is always this: recognizing we are nothing without God. For me, one whose life has been pretty easy, I had to be broken completely to the point of real weakness before I realized this fact. I don’t say this next part metaphorically. I got up, looked in the mirror, and I told myself, “You are not in control. God has so much better for you. God is hurting with you.” Verbalizing those three truths literally dried my tears. I have repeated them over and over to myself this past week because they are so true. It’s the last thing most people want to hear when their plans are toppled over, but it is the most important thing to believe: God has better for me. As each day has gone on, I believe that more and more. One of my favorite songs is Lean Back by Capital City Music. It has two parts: the pain and the joy. In the pain, it says “you have brought me here and given me space to breath... I will lean back in the loving arms of a beautiful savior.” That was me on the floor of my bathroom. He was letting me be sad over who I had lost, over my plans being disrupted. In the joy, it says “now I can see your love is better than all the others that I’ve seen.” That was the moment I got up. The Lord will always be changing our perspective, challenging our normal, and altering our own plans, but he will never let you stay in the pain. He will pick you up and give you vision to see the good waiting. You have to lean back into his arms before you can realize that, though. I always have been one to depend on my own strength over God’s. My own strength left me in a heap on the floor, angry and heartbroken. God’s strength gave me the will to stand, to move on, and vision to see that his plans are truly so much better. I have hope, I have excitement, I have joy because Jesus came as a baby so that in moments where we feel more alone than ever, we can feel his heartbeat. We can hear his whispers. We can know his goodness, even when we don’t know his plans.