Before I get into organizing my thoughts (which could be scary!) on this lazy Friday afternoon, I just have to say that I love being at home… the house is relatively clean, I have flowers on the table, and all I hear is the whirring of the fans and the purring kitteh. I love it.
Anyway. I was wasting time playing mindless games on my iPod (yes, still have one of those) and I was just thinking about life, and all this philosophical mumbo-jumbo that’s hard to put into words concisely. Do I ever write anything concisely? Not really, but I will try.
But lately I’ve been thinking about how I had planned out my life, as if I could control and obtain certain circumstances that would make all the things I wanted possible. Like, I had thought that I’d still be teaching, probably still in Middle of a Cornfield, Illinois, and we’d have bought a house and popped out a kid by now. But have any of those things come to pass? Obviously not. Obviously life has taken us in a very different and unexpected direction.
What percentage of events in life can we really predict or expect anyway? Why are we so “hell-bent”, as the title says, on making things go our way and meeting our expectations?
They say that 95% of our worries never come to pass, and I’m starting to think it’s the same way with expectations. We can have all these supposedly grandiose things planned to do in life, and then when they don’t happen according to our timeline, we throw a little temper tantrum like a two-year-old, except we’re actually a 25-year-old mature(ish) woman with more blessings that she can count…. (yeah, that would be me in case you’re wondering…)
How does that even make sense? Things, so far, have turned out just fine. Sure, some times are rough, but that’s life. Things would be rough in an Illinois cornfield with a baby, too. (No, not Children of the Corn… though I think we joked about that sometimes where I worked…)
Lately, as in this week, I’ve been moving towards a more grateful and accepting attitude of my life and how it’s turned out so far instead of being bitter and resenting certain things like the United States military (cough cough).
My God is bigger than the military, bigger than my expectations, and certainly bigger than my hell-bent dependence on me. I think once we grasp the inevitability and uncertainty of life, we can move towards making better decisions that actually have our spiritual well-being and eternity in mind.
The expectations and deadlines seem to fade away, as memories of what we once thought we’d be, and then our future and even the present seem to brighten… suddenly we’re actually living life day by day instead of striving for something that’s not certain to happen anyway. We move to a clearing in the woods where we’re free to trust more instead of holding on to a plan that’s really not the plan.
We realize that everything is always Plan A, and never “second best”. A good friend’s thoughts on “Plan A” really stuck with me when she was describing how her husband of 27 years had passed away, and ten years later she fell in love and married again. Her second husband wasn’t a replacement or a Plan B… he’d always been part of Plan A from the start, unbeknownst to her.
This is just another one of those things where I realize how much God loves us… that He’s always had our “Plan A” in mind, and will continue to execute it in our lives as we allow ourselves to trust. When we trust, we have joy. When we have joy, we find contentment, and when we find contentment, we have peace.
And when I think of peace, I think of this…
What a great place for my mind (& heart) to be.
mercies per mile 
Thank you for your comment on my last blog. It’s been an emotional rollercoaster, especially since Jon had to leave for JRTC 3 days after we found out. Slowly, God’s peace is coming over me and I am learning to deal with this. We’ll eventually get there :). Hope all is well with you! 🙂