Failing Plans and a Good God

My glittery red nail polish has chipped off just in time to paint on the gold that comes with ringing the New Year in. It’s always this time of year you get all reflective and weepy about where you have been and where you are going. You dust off the resolutions from last year and see how you did… I managed to stick to one of mine… not getting pregnant in 2015. It’s a weird one I know but I wanted to enjoy this year fully with the two kids I had. Plus I was a little bit sleep deprived up with a newborn last year and swearing off this whole big family thing. I have since reentered crazy town thinking and recently told ben I will weep when all our kids are out of diapers (he looked at me like I just said I wanted to be vegan).

The end of the year is always so monumental but I never quite understand it. Like the mark of a new year will change all the good or bad we did last year. We all want fresh starts. We want to dust off the old and embrace the new but I, like so many others, have a hard time doing the work it takes to embrace the new. My other goal last year was to finish this second book that has been building inside of me for the past year. I dreamed of have those 50,000 words ready to submit when 2016 rolled around, or even better, having already submitted them. However I didn’t know what 2015 held when I made the tiny promise to myself to finish what I started and I found myself halfway through 2015 putting life on pause again to face reality that was casting a dark shadow over my dreams. I found myself wallowing in reality instead of chasing my dreams.

Life never seems to go as planned. This year all I wanted to do was be a better blogger. That sounds silly but I have been pretty careless about something I care so much about. Not blogging… writing. This is where I work out the kinks in my voice and learn how to trim a message down to 1k words. However my writing is kind of like a tornado, I ride the storm, spend 30 minutes hammering out my thoughts, read it once over, then press publish not caring about the fact that I average 10 grammatical errors per post. I hear that’s frowned upon. I wanted to be more intentional with this space even if it’s mostly for me. Well, when I sat down to write out this post my computer died… and it didn’t come back to life. I had to laugh. I fired up my old computer, thanked God I married an engineer who is worlds smarter than me, got him to save my old files and started out again (hence why this post in being published in February).

Life never seems to go as planned which isn’t always a bad thing, the unexpected twists are often the best parts of our stories. The bottom line is always the nagging question of, do I trust God with my plans? Am I willing to say this is what I want but Lord your will not mine. It’s scary sometimes because God is big and powerful and we like control. However, if we believe the right things about God we are much more willing to lay our plans at his feet without fear. If we truly believe he is good we can make plans with open hands knowing what he has is always better.

That has never felt more real than where I am right now in life. I seem to be constantly asking what is next. For me, for my kids, for our family,” God where are you leading us” seems to be the question I mutter every night as I close my eyes. I have dreams, desires, and plans but more than that I want his purpose and his passions to be poured into my heart. My plans without his guidance won’t be what I imagine. My dreams without his heartbeat won’t be the right dreams and my desires will become selfish if I don’t align them with his. I know my story will be so mundane unless I give him permission to wreck it all.

So as we enter the second month of 2016 I am wondering if we can hold loosely to all the dreams we came up with as January 1^st came crashing in. Because here is what I know, this year will hold wonderful moments and disappointing ones. We will see dreams come true and some will come crashing down but if we know where we place our future and our hope we can breathe a little easier because he is the same yesterday today, in the good and in the bad.

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