{Do you Have a Plan for Your Life? I thought I did.}

Yesterday, I was pulling away and in pain.

Of my own creating I always wonder? It’s certainly difficult to ascertain culpability when depression is hereditary and when cycles of pain, withdrawing, insecurity, and self-loathing go back so far in a family’s story.  Still, why do I look for whom to blame when ultimately I blame myself?

Keen to enter into community life at least in theory, and even when depressed, I went to church yesterday. Anyway.  I listened, hard.  I sang  along and wept. The song, it was …

“I lift my eyes up. My help comes from the Lord.  He will always …

I find it impossible. Those words:  God always what? … Are there promises from God that are universal to all, for always?  If so, what are they?

Yesterday, I kept thinking you are not promised anything. 

… To be happy.

… To find joy.

… To experience contentment.

… To have work, (even more so) meaningful world-changing work.

How arrogant all these years I was thinking there was a plan for my life – yes, a really significant “thing” I was to do.  Truthfully, isn’t life more random than that?  And isn’t meaning drawn from the day-to-day questions?

How do you love?  Who do you love?  Do you honestly value the people in front of you today?

Yesterday’s lesson for me was to learn how important it is to tell them so. Be intentional and careful with the precious relationships that I do have.

I easily focus on my mistakes and foibles, my lack, which all too quickly moves to my future, even my lasting significance.  I am living into middle age physically downtrodden and constipated, believing the lie, even yesterday, that I’m unlikable. And that this is what matters?

Forgetting the truth, which is that it is better to give than to receive.

That is a plan.

That is a life.

In that one will find happiness, joy, contentment and even, quite possibly meaningful world-changing work.  But if not, truthfully being a “big shot” no matter how much something in me craves for it, isn’t “It” at all.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.  Hebrews 4:12

This is it, this is truth.

To know God and to be known by him and in turn to love others out of that knowledge.  To know God’s WORD, to keep seeking, searching, longing, wanting the Holy One more than anything.

May it be so.