** This post is the first I have read as an audio. In honor of my good friend and prayer partner who is struggling with some reading issues and headaches related to eye sight, you’ll find if you skip to the end of the text a link to a YouTube audio version of this blog post. If you prefer to listen than to read then this entry is for you! Find it also here: YouTube Audio Version.

I read a story about a young man who had been through tragedy and suffering; he was expecting a child after the loss of an only son. The man had set his hopes for the future on a son and employed a fortune teller to confirm a determination of the baby’s sex in a place and time without access to medical imagining that could give a more accurate expectation. Complications arose in the labor and the mother and child were almost lost. Desperate measures were taken by the women in the house in an attempt to save first the baby, who was finally delivered safely then the mother who had lost, and was still losing a concerning amount of blood. As the story continued, grandmother who had attended to the birth finally came out of the room with the child who was healthy and shared the news of the near deaths, and that the mother was now not bleeding but her life was still precarious. When the woman presented her son with his daughter he refused to hold the child in his fury and remarked that: Once again- God had failed them! What a wasted opportunity for Him to get it right, and make amends for the trauma the family had suffered! A girl! How could a good God have allowed this!

A few days later, in another book, I read about a man who had grown up in church with his family where he was taught about a good God who loves us and promises to bring us blessing. The boy grew into a man who found a beautiful wife who also loved God. He used his education to land a good job where he prospered and was always able to provide well for his growing family. His children followed a straight path, married well, and had healthy grandchildren. No one wanted for anything and it seemed so perfect, just like it was supposed to be when you love God and God loves you. Until… unexpectedly, one of his sons developed a brain tumor that did not have potential for treatment, and regardless of all the praying family and church friends, his adult son died a death that included great suffering toward the end. The tragedy tore open the threads of that family, and one the man’s granddaughters began struggling in school and turning to addiction. The perfect picture was broken, and the man told his wife he simply could not believe in a good God anymore. What had they done to deserve these painful circumstances? However since he couldn’t believe in a God that wasn’t good, he decided there was no God at all. He claimed: There is no purpose or meaning, life is simply a game of chance leaving some lucky and some unlucky. He deduced now he was one of the UNLUCKY. From now on he would fend for his family and self on his own.

Considering these two unconnected tales this morning, I headed out to walk in the woods from my house on a single track trail that rarely sees another person. The trail runs between my property and the neighboring farm, and leads into the National Forest eventually wandering into West Virginia. I am pretty sure I could get half way across that state before seeing another human being. I love these woods. I love watching my dogs wander up and down the sides of the gentle canyon as I walk along the little stream bed as they sniff out squirrels and joyfully run through the woods over rocks and under branches.

This trail is a special place for me, and right now it is in the glory of early October. The light is warm, the leaves are beginning to change, but still enough green that I don’t have to fear winter’s stark imminence yet. We still have the rest of October and even November before winter can be taken seriously. The colors are more vibrantly golden than the dying reds and browns, and the temperatures are crisp but not chilling, still promising gentle warmth in the afternoon. I rarely step onto this trail without my spirit falling into a deep gratitude and sense of wonder that I can hardly believe this is my life.

I spend a lot of time in thought on this trail, in prayer, contemplation and quiet as I walk. This morning in the golden light, I considered some of the trials my own life has seen. More than some. Less than others. I have struggled and grieved, I’ve started over more than once, and this current life I woke up to today is not one I had scripted, in any of the iterations of writing out my story I have done in years past.

Could I be the only one with this condition? Do we not all do this? Consciously or unconsciously plan out our lives in the way that seems fitting for us? Isn’t this what most of us in the west consider an ultimate freedom? The right to script our lives in the way we think they should go?

I considered the stories, the men had a plan in mind and when reality took them off script each found themselves unmoored, somehow off the plot, and become certain they had either been failed by God, or that there was no God, only blind chance or fate. I can understand the sense of confusion, yet in both stories I found myself aghast at the conclusion. 

The first story was so clearly a tale of the goodness of God to give wisdom to women in a home birth that saved a mother and child whose lives were very seriously on the line. One mother’s view of the day is that clearly the miraculous love of a Father God brought life against the schemes of death, while an earthly father can only see his plan of another son to replace the child that was lost had been derailed. Someone from outside the plot entirely might even see what a grace on the child this was as well, considering no child can live up to being a replacement for a lost sibling. The entire scene was dripping with God’s love. Can we be so stuck on our plot we cannot see the grace and love poured out on us? Could God denying us our imagined story actually be a kindness?

In the second story, I could see as it unfolded, that someone with such a shallow experience of how God loves his children might be in for stormy seas when finally something doesn’t go according to their perfect comfortable plan, yet I was still dumbfounded to think that decades of blessing and comfort and ease could be in any way seen as “poor luck” because disease finally makes its way in, and the trauma that enters with it arrives. The man was blinded to the generous blessings that surrounded him in the one difficult situation that came. Can we be so blind?

I am looking deeper this year into what it means that God is love. I am asking questions about the sovereignty of God- what does that mean? Asking questions about my perception of things and how it is not always what is true in the larger and longer view. 

For example, I might hope to ride my horse on the only day I have free in a week, and find that the day it rains significantly. I have some options in how I respond. 

I could ride anyway and brave the poor weather conditions. Maybe this will make me stronger in some way- taking on adverse conditions. 

I could choose to curse the rain and wonder why God would do this to me, did he not KNOW that I had plans to ride my horse today? My horse needs the exercise too, could He not have answered my prayer for a good riding day on the only day I had available? Doesn’t he love me?

What if He did know, and sent the rain as the gift of a good father?

What if I needed rest in a busy season, and my only day to ride my horse was also the only day I had to rest and recover. What if without the day of rest, vulnerability to sickness was at my doorstep? Meanwhile the rain is needed for the grass my horses need to eat as the pastures recover from a partial drought, and the springs are getting perilously dry. What if the rain being held back on the buys days helped make chores and work go more smoothly in order to get through all that I had to do, and this day the rain pressed me into postponing my original plans and staying in, reading a book or taking a needed nap?

Is the rain an expression of love or an inconvenience? Does God really consider every… single… detail? Does he bring the rain, or the unfortunate circumstances or simply allow them and promise to weave them together for my good and his glory? What does that even mean? 

Might I begin to live in a way that whatever comes, instead of fighting it I ask God how to see it? How to use what I have been given or to really trust that it is for my good?

A day of rain might feel like an inconvenience, maybe I can get to the spiritual resilience that I can handle a disappointing rainy day, but what about a scary diagnosis? A tragic accident? A premeditated violent attack that shifts lives forever? A “natural” disaster that claims more lives than we can count? Is God in these things? Does he allow or does he send them? With these questions come even larger the wish to understand: how then do I pray??

How many times do I pray against the difficulty that God is sending me for some great purpose out of his love? Yet I don’t believe it is ever wrong to pray for healing, or even to pray for smoothing out of challenges and circumstances. Is there a way we might pray however that would align us more closely with the Father’s heart? When God sent an illness to David’s son with Bathsheba (see 2 Samuel 12) he fasted and prayed for the son to be healed. When God answered clearly with the death of the child those around David worried he would finally become unhinged but he did not. When the child died he cleaned himself and ate. He accepted the answer from God and took the steps to continue forward in the new plot, one he had not written himself. Considering until this point the plot David had been writing was bordering on incredibly evil it is a great kindness that God intervened through Samuel, through David’s heart, and in the end taking the child born of such selfish sin and shifted the plot. Even this shifted plot was not suffering and pain free for David, but God kept his promise to always be with him as he walked in the greatness of being a king as well as the humility of being on the run again due to consequences of poor choices. 

David’s example reminds me it is always good to pray for health and healing and victory- even if it was God who sent the illness- and to trust when God gives us plot twists we had hoped against, and in time get on the same page. In this, it will be better for me if I accept that regardless of if I like the chapter at the moment, God loves me, He is a good God, and He promises to weave a beautiful and perfect story for my life here as I stay in submission to his larger story.

I heard an example of an airplane flying through smooth skies with attendants serving food and drink when a sudden loss of altitude sent anyone not secured off balance, luggage tumbling, and a few minor injuries from the violent shift. Later, after the grumbling of the discomfort, cuts and scrapes and bruises, it was learned that somehow a mistake had been made and there was an imminent collision with another aircraft. The only way to save all the lives on the two planes was to make a radical correction to a different altitude and all at once. The same inconvenience was then seen completely differently. It had to do with perspective, but also of understanding of things greater than what is in front of us at the moment. 

Ideally, there would never be the kind of error that made the situation in the first place- but this is akin to expecting heaven’s circumstances on earth. Humans dumped that script early on in the fall. Apparently the perfect story seemed dull to Eve, and our ancestors preferred to write their own- isn’t that what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil provided? The right to write your own destiny, your own story, your own script? You too can be like God.

Only we are not qualified for that role. Ironically, Satan doesn’t actually need to take over, he just needs to get enough imperfect self-centered humans to decide we should take over… even if it is only our own lives, that does enough damage that he doesn’t have to do much else to bring a great destruction.

When my life has gone “off script” in the past, I have at times embraced it and ran toward the exciting adventure change brings, and in other times I have grieved and mourned from the brokenness and uncertainty ahead of me.  Youth is helpful bringing a kind of hope that even if we don’t have the story on track, we have time to drag it back (and drag as many others along to make it work out how we think it should be). The longer we live and don’t see the plot coming back to our original hopeful plan, things can start to shake underneath us. Possibly more difficult is when it seemed to be going so well when a violent shift jerks us onto an entirely new story that we had not considered.

Today I read that God’s love language is trust. 

He promises that he is good, and that he loves us. When the plane changes altitude abruptly and sends us to the ground with bruises, cuts and scrapes, do we trust that this was an act of love and kindness? Or do we grumble about the cuts and bruises? What about when the plan crashes into the ocean and we are floating on debris wondering if there will be rescue?

There was a season when I asked God to stop helping. I had asked him to come and take over in my life because it became apparent I was steering dangerously close to cliffs and the darker things got the less I could see where I was going. I knew I was in peril. Looking back, what it felt like is he agreed to help, and then he drove us over the cliff into the ocean on purpose! God are you mad? Is this your idea of helping??

Thankfully it was a convertible, and we flew into the air, lived through the crash into the dark waters beneath and then found a life vest somehow (can we say grace?) I might have been ok, but then we end up almost drowning in rapids on our way to safety (still no one to pull me out of the water?) and at some point I’d had about enough of God’s course correction and figured if he didn’t stop helping me get onto dry land I’d never live through it all. 

He didn’t listen- apparently my plea for help was binding. 

Thankfully, He believed more in me than I did in myself. He kept going, pulling me along, and somehow I got stronger and less shaken by the detours, rapids, and altitude shifts. Eventually I began to see we were getting to better terrain, and I started learning trust. God could have simply translated us from the cliffs of despair to a straight path through the wilderness, but He didn’t. We went through instead. Together.

As I walked my wooded trail, I considered the things I am hoping for that I cannot see evidence of yet today. On the other hand I considered the ridiculous favor and blessing I can see weaving around me undeserved. I see the soft light through the rhododendron tunnel like stained glass on the ground with golden leaves creating a yellow walkway. I considering the trail I love walking with my dogs and know it’s unlikely I will walk this trail forever. Someday it will be a beautiful memory as my story takes more unexpected turns. This gift is a treasure I am thankful for every time I set foot on it, I do not take it for granted; and yet fifteen years ago I could not imagine it. 

I spend less time today trying to write the story ahead of me because I have come to see that my wisdom runs quickly short sighted, and I don’t have the same perfect view my father has. Over the years I more quickly go from panic to trust. 

The true, the real, the living God is more wild than I can comprehend. I want to know Him as he is, not the him who I think I imagine him to be. I have to live in the tension that he wants me to know him, but his ways are higher than mine. I can’t even imagine what things he has planned for those who love and serve him. This year, in my year of wild, I have asked God to reveal more of himself to me and that I desire to know and love him for who he is, not for who I have made him out to be. 

This journey both excites and terrifies me. We may make our plans, but God arranges our steps. This both comforting and frightening at times. What wonderful and terrible things has he planned for my life? I do want to find out, and I do want to trust him, that even when disappointments come I can be at peace knowing nothing escapes him, and regardless of what evil might have been planned against me, I always win. God always spins the circumstances for my good, even if it feels like a dramatic course correction and I get bruised along the way.

When I see people who are unshakable, who stand resilient in the face of ANYTHING, the common factor is they are not so worried about their own plans. They seem to be able to shift quickly into asking God what he is doing and how to join in then they are to fight against what they see in front of them. I think this is tricky especially when it looks like what we were doing WAS in God’s plan, and it seems so obvious to us as a human that God needs us to get in there and fight for HIS plan because it’s apparently being thwarted! Is God that easily thwarted? Does he really need our help, or does he honor us with the invitation to join him? Is it possible when that amazing mission trip we have been planning gets derailed we could sit back and ask God how to see what He is doing instead of raging against the world and the devil for daring to try to stop God’s will? Could this detour actually BE the plan A? Do we even ask? 

Maybe this is how we can someday come to count it all joy when we face trials and challenges. Maybe this is a way to see the rainy day, or the great program to share Jesus diverted, or the unexpected tragedy and be honest with the sadness, the grief, or the loss, and not come unglued and begin fighting or protecting. Maybe as we continue to live our days here on earth we can be at peace because we know whatever this plot twist is, it’s being woven into a beautiful story that someday we will be astounded by. We will see that it wasn’t that moment that mattered most, or even a chapter of our lives that in heartache can feel like forever, but that all of these things were part of a bigger chapter, a bigger book, a much much bigger story, that our piece of had great meaning. 

Maybe we will see that how we stewarded challenges, difficulty and loss carried greater impact on generations than if the great plans went off without a hitch. Will we see that our part fit into something grand and stunning? Maybe we will see that nothing was lost at all- the compassion we showed toward someone who hurt us badly could shift a line that though small at the time, ended up moving unseen mountains. Or maybe we will see moments we didn’t understand while in them, as a great kindness to us, a tender compassion from our father that at the time didn’t feel very good at all.

Some of my deepest griefs and losses have over time shown themselves already as gifts I didn’t know I desperately needed. I am only able to walk this trail in the woods today because of some unexpected plot twists I did not welcome at the time. Each day I hold my future story more loosely and tell God the desires of my heart and ask him to sift them for me only granting me the ones that will build my bigger story, and to take his time in the ones that are not for now, even though I am often impatient. Whatever I do not have right now I do not need right now. And what is coming I will be equipped to walk through in the time I am called to do it.

On my trail I have more questions than answers most of the time, and this year has lent itself to a challenge in my writing, because many of the pieces I begin to tease open, disintegrate into greater wonder and mystery and refuse to be tied back up into a neat blog post. 

As I write this one, I have a hope it will find its way to being published… even if it leaves more questions than usual, or doesn’t have a tidy thread of a theme to follow and close. Maybe this blog is more of a choose your own adventure story from my childhood than a clear plot novel of adulthood. Maybe.