The other day I was pondering everything that's going on in my life right now, and it occurred to me that this is very much the same lesson God keeps trying to teach me. Again and again and again. Amusingly enough, it ties into the name of the ol blog here as well.
I was raised with the notion that "if it was to be, it was up to me" drilled into my head. Successful people made a plan, implemented the plan, stuck to the plan. There was always a plan. There was never time for dithering.
Those plans were definitely to be made and implemented prayerfully, but one didn't sit around praying about what the plan should be. Instead, one used their God-given intellect to determine a course and then started walking, all the while praying that God would direct steps and make turns as needed.
I don't know that that's necessarily wrong, any more than I think it's wrong to sit and, as my mother would have phrased it, waste ones life praying about what to do next. But I suspect "right" lies closer to the middle.
Regardless, I've always been someone with a plan. I would go to college, meet my husband, start a family, be a mom. If I worked, I would teach.
Some of that worked out. I went to college and met my husband. And while we waited a little before trying the family thing, I taught. And mostly I hated it.
That's not completely true - I love teaching. I don't love students and their parents. Really that makes the teaching part a lot harder and less of an ideal career choice.
If you're a long-time reader here, you know how the whole "start a family" thing went. (If not, you can find it in the archives. The short summary is twelve years, lots of doctors, lots of failed adoptions, two that succeeded.)
During that time, I wrestled with and ultimately came to find peace and rest in the sovereignty of God.
But I am finding I still clung to that upbringing of have a plan, work the plan.
Because the struggles youngest has? Totally threw me. They were not in my plan.
But they were in God's.
New struggles with eldest? Again, not in my plan.
Totally in God's. (And this, for real, because it's been fascinating to see God working in eldest over the last year as we've wrestled with his OCD and it has taken his future plans on a sharp turn in another direction, but one that fits him, as it were, like a glove.)
One of the "long term" plans I have held onto with white knuckles was the idea that, once the boys were launched and hubby could cut back if not retire, that we would travel. The trip around the world that I was planning for after graduating with my PhD, that got tossed out when we were chosen by eldest's bio mom (wouldn't trade it!) would come back into play. Not in one fell swoop, but in many little trips here, there, and everywhere.
We hit a hiccup when we moved to this house. Our other house took forever to sell. To span the gap, we had to decimate a retirement fund. Blah blah blah. I sighed and frantically tried to readjust. Travel wasn't off the table, it was just pushed back a little. Retirement wouldn't come early, like we'd been hoping. But it would still come.
Then it was, "let's travel with the boys!" And we might still - but I have a little mini panic attack when I think of trying to manage both of their individual needs away from home and familiar things. Maybe that's all me. They might be just fine. But it's going to take a lot to get me to book flights knowing the what ifs.
And now, when the reality seems to be that we'll be taking on, at a minimum, guardianship, if not outright adoption the niece or nephew due in the spring. I am realizing that travel and retirement and just the future in general is not going to look like my plan.
Not at all.
And it's funny, because this time, it hasn't really set me back. I have peace with it. (Not to say I love it - because it's not going to be a jig in the park - but peace.) Which is good, because it seems as though it's hubby's turn to struggle.
Every time we discuss the baby, he begins to panic. We are stretched thin with the boys (true). He doesn't have enough time as it is (true, but also welcome to life, I don't think we ever have the time we wish we did.) What if. What if. What if.
I've been reading about Elisha recently, and the widow with one meal of flour and oil left. And I can look back at our lives and see that very thing in action. Are we stretched thin? Yes. But that simply means we have to rely on God. We can't plan beyond getting through today. Possibly this week.
I am learning to be okay with a vague notion of what might be.
So I said to the hubs, "We have the oil and the flour to get through today. It's enough. If this is where God wants us to be, then He's going to sustain us. If it's not, then He'll make that clear."
And I am holding on to that as my plan.
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