going old-school

We were told God had a plan, and I knew what his plan was for me because he showed it to me through the words of other people and through my own desires. John Eldredge wrote a book about how our heart's innermost desires reveal to us God's plans for our lives. It's funny, isn't it, how God's plan for us is all about what we want? Which is strange, because the God whose plans are in alignment with our desires has apparently changed his mind since the days of the bible; I look at what God had planned for people like Abraham, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and I don't want that. Forced to leave my homeland? Not allowed to marry, drink, or party? Forced to walk around the city naked for a good long while, and then you're paid for all this by getting sawed in half by a king who unraveled everything you worked for and stained your name throughout the nation? Yeah, none of that's appealing. So tell me what I'm missing when you tell me that God's plans are intricately connected to our own desires. 

All this aside, it doesn't take long for us to realize that things aren't as simple as we thought, and as life unravels with misfortune after misfortune, blessings sprinkled in here-and-there,  we begin to question what we've been told. Some might say, "Hey, wait, you have a pretty bleak outlook on things. Wouldn't you say it's the other way around, that life is filled with blessings but sprinkled with misfortune here-and-there?" No, I wouldn't and won't say that, because even though I have it great with nothing but my first-world problems, the reality is that our own entitlement doesn't negate the fact that the vast rest of the world is born, lives, and dies amidst squalor, despair, and absolute hopelessness. 

The idea that God doesn't have a plan for us, and that God isn't going to give us the rose-garden experience we want, that's a hard idea to swallow. On the one hand it opens the door to freedom; but on the other hand, the uncertainty of everything can be overwhelmed. We use destiny, fate, and "God's plan for our lives" as a crutch: when life turns to shit, we tell ourselves that there's always a rainbow after the storm, daybreak after the night, and that this is all part of the plan, and God's going to bring it all together and give us the frosted-picture-window ending we've always wanted. It's easier to do this than to face the seeming reality of things, and all along we're praised as resilient, faithful, dutiful Christians because we're making it through things all right and "trusting God" the entire way. Never-mind that we're just engaging in that psychological trick called cognitive dissonance, best equated with the picture of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand and denying the world raging all around it. 

It's frightening being on the other side of things, it really is. A long time ago I abandoned the idea that God had some specific blueprint for my life, and then a bit later I abandoned the idea that because I'm a part of God's people, my life would eventually become what I always wanted it to be: a loving wife, having some children, doing ministry in a small church somewhere. I believed that's what God would give me, but I came to learn that such "trusting" is truly childlike, and not in the good way like you want.