Plans? Why Do I Try

Do you ever feel like you just keep hitting a wall, road blocks, or glass windows?  
(oh yes, our planned out week has run into a few detours!) 

MAN!  Actually, it might be more like the past few years not just our week!  SHOOT!  If I really look at it, its been our entire life!  I am not denying we have had many wonderful blessings because we have been quite blessed.  But we have also experienced our fair share of hurts, pains, and struggles.  Have you?

I have to remind myself that this life wasn't meant to be my heaven. We can testify that from our personal problems like short sale of home, moving, loss of job, broken down cars..try 4 at once!, child-parent issues, hurt, pain, physical pain, emotional pain, loss of a parent, loss of a baby, move after move, finances not going as planned, and definitely disappointments when things just don't go like you think.  It is hard to complain too much when you also look at God's grace.  I can always play out our pain/struggle and see each thing could have been so much worse.  Although having things come one right after another can be tiring let alone defeating if you let it.

I really should be careful what I say because I've always shared who better to struggle than the believer.  (But..my goodness...it just keeps hitting!)  I'm ready for some smooth sailing.  No more bees (which they have disappeared!  I am still quite alarmed about that little saga!).  No more broken down cars.  Can we please just land somewhere?!

It really would be something to have my plans go like I have it in my head!  Although, who is to say many of those things didn't go right?  They each could have been far worse.  So maybe, I had blessings I might miss if I end up saying, "woe is me" that DID NOT go as I planned!

I do have to remind myself just because something didn't go as planned or wasn't pain free doesn't mean I wasn't in God's will.  I think too many times we think hassles, pain, and road blocks, we think we were wrong.  So what happens when you pray about it, it appears to you God is leading and then things inevitably don't go like you saw in your head?  Were you out of God's will?

Some will say yes.  I have had my fair share of people say, "I hope you figure out what God is trying to tell you fast so this stuff will stop."  REALLY?  I beg to differ.  I'm not saying I don't ever misread what God is saying, I am quite sure I have stepped wrong...but you know what...God is still at work in my life.  Sometimes He may have us go down a path that ISN'T so easy.  Look at it this way...Jesus died on a cross.  Was He out of God's will?  He definitely suffered!  He took your sin and my sin and was crucified.  He was SINLESS!!!  So saying because something hurts or goes wrong means you are out of God's will is just a bad/wrong statement.

I don't serve a God who bases my relationship on my works.  Praise the Lord!  I serve a God who gives His grace freely...even yet for a sinner like me!  THIS is why I can rejoice even through our chaos of disaster, frustration, and pain.  

I have plans that still do not play out like I think.  I have thought for 4 years we would be settled in a house, living in community, and surrounded by my kids and friends.  Instead I find we are still in transition, living in several communities because it is hard to be plugged in when you move as often as we have the past several years.  And well...those kids just had to grow up and do what we raised them to do which is to be independent young adults that leave the nest!

I long to have a home they can come home to but if that doesn't come until heaven, then so be it!  My joy will not be robbed.  I might shed a tear here or there.  I might long to be in community attending Bible Studies, being involved in the city, and have a few friends/couples to do life with but it will come.  I can tell you for sure that we still have joy in our hearts even when those plans are different than we saw in our head.

This world will never be my heaven so I am not defeated by roadblocks or glass windows!  So the next time you hit your roadblock or disappointment (because you will as long as we are on this side of heaven).  Find your joy and peace through that chaos, because God IS THERE.  We can be a bright light to someone by our response to those things.  I guarantee...someone is watching and YOU!  YOU just might be the one that gives them HOPE.  Maybe that was God's plan all along.  We have a world that has lost HOPE.  It is time for us Christians to stand up and be a LIGHT in a very DARK world.