Life sometimes takes unexpected turns. Navigating those turns well can make all the difference.
I never thought I’d be a stay at home mom. I went to school and got a few degrees because I wanted to work; I wanted to change the world. I was the kid that wrote a book about being the first woman president.
I guess things change.
Because here’s the thing. I’m going to give it to you right up front so you don’t miss it.
Our imagination is not enough to hold all that life has to offer.
I know that sounds a little pie-in-the-sky, but if life always happened the way we imagined I’d be in an intense battle for my first term as President of these United States, even though I despise politics, can’t follow economics, and wish we could all just get along.
Sometimes what we imagine isn’t right for us.
We think things are going to be one way and days (or decades) later we find ourselves looking back and saying this isn’t what I thought it would be.
Maybe we’re relieved. We feel grateful that we chose a different path (or the path chose us) and we exhale big thankful for the change in course.
But maybe we wonder where it went wrong, where we went wrong. We wonder if we ever had it right to begin with. We doubt ourselves to the core and wonder if we are the person we thought we were.
We wonder what changed and if we never even had it right to begin with. And we think. And we think.
What do we really expect?
Too often people find themselves in this position and that’s when they give up and say I’m out. They cut ties thinking it will free them from that feeling of failure. Instead they just drift away, and the feeling never leaves.
Maybe the problem isn’t that we were wrong. Maybe the problem is that we expect to get it all right. We think we somehow know all that’s going to come, all that we’re going to become. Maybe getting it wrong isn’t the problem at all.
Maybe it’s that what we imagine is only a human hope and we expect it to be divine.
Finding freedom
We look back and think that maybe we imagined too big, but maybe we really imagined too small. Maybe what we imagine for our lives isn’t big enough, isn’t beautiful enough.
When we start walking forward in His dreams for us instead of limiting ourselves to our own, maybe then we’ll find that we are no longer drifting away in failure. Maybe then we will see that we are sailing in freedom.
