The Way Things Change

 

I was talking with a friend a few days ago about future plans, and how hard, but good, it is when God upsets those plans and dreams and replaces them with something else, something that will bring His glory and expand His Kingdom in ways that we never would have imagined. Speaking for no one but myself, I can see over and over again how that has been true in my life.

Growing up, I was going to be a writer, or a painter, or an astronaut, or any of a dozen different things – all at once, of course, because, that way, I wouldn’t have to pick just one. Never for a moment was I going to do the things that I read about in missionary biographies. I was going to write stories like those, not do them.

Things changed, and I was going to get a degree in youth ministry, or sociology, or linguistics at a school that everyone knew the name of, with professors that taught things I couldn’t find the answers to on my own. Never for a moment was I going to attend a tiny school that was only partially accredited or get a degree in Intercultural Studies or write so few research papers that I could count them on one hand.

I was going to take time off and thru hike the Appalachian Trail, or the Pacific Crest Trail, or backpack through Europe. Nowhere on my mental calendar was there a chunk of time blocked out for going to Africa, let alone spending sixteen months in Kenya.

If I wrote a book, it was going to be fiction, something to replace the endless stream of historical romance that tries to pass itself off as adult Christian fiction. A non-fiction book on social justice activism was nowhere on the radar.

When Kenya did come into the picture, I was going to work with street kids, or teenagers, or at least mainly boys.  Nowhere were there plans to spend months in an office working with someone on a preschool curriculum or to spend hour after hour playing with the daughters of different missionary families.

After school, I was going to relax, live quietly for a while, get a job, and raise money for a future in Nicaragua, working with kids, still mainly boys, who live on the street. Never for a moment, was I going to ask people to do the impossible, to set apart a month of their lives – or the lives of their children – purely for the purpose of growing in an understand of God’s heart for justice.

My goal in life, even after Nicaragua came into the picture, was to be a pseudo wall flower, never attracting too much attention or doing anything too strange. Obviously, God had other plans.

What about you? Where has the Lord taken you that you never thought you would be?

(The picture choice was more or less completely random, but I tend to think that living in the desert and being fed by ravens probably wasn’t high on Elijah’s bucket list either.)