When God's Plans Don't Match Our Own

Adam is a wiggler when he sleeps. Actually, he's like a little break dancer. He kicks and squirms and nearly rolls over, until he ultimately does a 180 in his crib. I lay him down with his head on one end of the bed, and next time I check on him it is on the opposite end!

Now, in the middle of the night, in the dark, when I've just been jarred from sleep by little grunts and cries, this can be very disorienting! I look into the crib and see...what is that? What am I looking at? His head looks weird! This isn't right. It takes my brain several seconds to catch up and realize that it looks strange because it's not a head at all, it's his feet!

In any other occasion, if I were to look at Adam's feet, I would immediately recognize them as feet. I know what feet look like! But when I'm looking at them, fully expecting them to be a head, they suddenly become some strange, unrecognizable objects. It's confusing and I struggle to make sense of it.

Of course, it doesn't take too long before my brain kicks in and I realize what has happened. But this disorienting illusion can happen to us in other areas of life, and sometimes it is a lot harder to see the sense in it.

We make plans in life. We expect our plans to play out in the ways we've imagined. I always thought I would be a high school English teacher. I love literature and writing. I love helping people. I'm a strong public speaker. I'm also empathetic. All the career assessments in high school, college, and even graduate school indicated teaching as an ideal career for me. So, naturally, I expected to become a teacher and love it. I had taken all the steps to prepare for it. It was logical that things should go according to my plans.

But when I found myself withdrawing from the Masters in Teaching program, scrambling to find a job to help pay the bills, and with no clue what to do next, I was confused. What was this life? This wasn't my life. Not the life I had expected to see. It was unrecognizable. The stress, the feelings of failure, the desperation of not knowing... I didn't know what that was, but it wasn't my life. It wasn't my plans.

It wasn't until I stopped trying to see my life through the lens of my own plans that I began to see it for what it was. I couldn't see the new opportunities ahead of me, until I gave up on the identity I had clung to for so many years. God's plans for me were different. When I accepted that, I finally felt less confused. Things came into focus.

I can't recognize Adam's feet as feet until I give up on the idea that it should be his head. Once I realize, okay, this is not his head, I immediately can see what it really is.

Maybe once we give up on our own insistence of how things should look, how situations should play out, how God should handle certain people and certain circumstances -- then maybe we can begin to see them as they really are. Until we can do that, we'll always be seeing a distorted image of what we want to see. We'll always be seeing a really freaky looking head!