When life doesn't go like I think it should...

What do you do when life doesn’t happen the way you think it should?  Maybe I am just extremely naive but I feel like this is a major thread in the story of my life over the past few years. When things don’t go as you have planned, when things happen that you would NEVER expect to happen to you, when things you have dreamed about for as long as you can remember have not come to pass yet, when you are working towards a goal and it seems that nothing is going right. What do you do? Friend, as much as I desperately want to give you a list of step by step instructions I don’t have one… I don’t know what you do. Waiting is a really really hard place to be, I know, I feel like a lot of my life recently has been spent in waiting. Waiting on things I have dreamed of, hoped for, anticipated for a long time. It's hard, life is hard and I wish I had a straight cut answer for ya… because I am all about a plan. If you tell me to do x, y and z and this will happen then I am your girl all the way… but unfortunately, life doesn't work that way.

 I am a thinker, an over analyzer, and a planner and I literally have to tell myself to chill out on the regular, haha. I laugh because I realize that getting worked up over false expectations is just silly… but we still do it, all the time. Life is full of disappointment and hard things, like really really hard things - like take your breath away, I am not sure how I am going to be able to go on, hard things. I sit here at my desk and write this with tears in my eyes because my tendency is to fall in the ditch of why me, why does it seem like things work out for everyone else, why am I still here at this same place in life, why am I working so hard for things that seem to not be going anywhere… I have to believe that I am not alone in this. But even in the midst of the messes and disappointments I am still learning to embrace the uncertainty. I am by no means very good at this… but I am reminded that I can choose to dwell on the circumstances and let them define who I am or I can choose to remember WHO I am and that my circumstances DO NOT define me! I don’t know what you believe, but when I feel like nothing is going the way I thought it should I have to make the choice to look back at God’s faithfulness. Of what he has brought me through, of how he has rescued me and redeemed me, how he is making me new in him. I choose to look back at how far I have come, not to boast but to remind myself that I am not in the same place, that I am okay, that I am one hell of a lot stronger than I ever thought I was. Today, maybe you need to make a choice too, it's not easy and life is hard - it's okay to not be okay, just don’t set up camp there.