When Plans Don't Go As Planned

It seems to be a theme in our lives. Mostly for me; I'm a micro-planner. If I'm not careful, I can spend hours a day just planning details of events or seasons of life that are years ahead of now. I can daydream up and set imaginary expectations of my boys elementary school years, teen years, my 10th or 20th year as a teacher, or the 10 year anniversary of our marriage. I can envision what life could be like in all of those seasons.

So naturally, after years of premature planning, when it finally came time to move our family to North Texas, I had every idea of exactly how it was going to lay out. I prayed faithfully. I read devotionals on promise and fulfillment. I took the steps necessary to ensure that this idea God had planted into our hearts would come alive... exactly how I wanted it to. I had a daycare lined up. I reached out to local mom groups, looked up pediatricians, and spoke with friends about where we should go to church. I basically had this next season of our lives planned out halfway through summer before we'd ever even set foot in the apartment I signed a lease for before seeing in person.

Then, we moved in.

The first couple of months following our move were some of the most unexpected months we've experienced as a family in a long time. We had numerous set backs in our finances. Stephen was in a car accident that totaled our only paid-for vehicle, meaning a whole new car payment we weren't planning to budget for. We both had new jobs that we needed to get accustomed to. We went from a town where everything was a short 10 or 15-minute drive away to one of the biggest cities in the state! My fear as a mother was that the adjustment would be too much for our little ones, so I tried as hard as possible to be present and steady and involved every moment that I could. It was a lot to juggle! Somehow, none of this seemed all that stressful when I was micro-planning my new life up. I just assumed things would fall into place seamlessly. We never seem to think about the hard things when we're dreaming up a fresh start, huh?

It's such a paradox to have so many expectations of what a new season of life will look like and yet have no idea at the same time. I knew I'd love my job. I knew we'd enjoy exploring a new city, the restaurants and play places and shopping malls. But there are so many other things that are very unexpected. We've just recently started getting connected to a church home and we're still trying to get our bearings on community in this new and very different place. These last few months have been filled with praising, celebrating, questioning, pleading with, clinging to, and giving up on, and thanking my heavenly Father.

It's taken my heart much longer to adjust to this new city than I'd expected. It has taken a great deal of reflecting and praying to find the love for this place and these people that I had back in my old little town. I'd spent so long yearning to move up here, envisioning what life would be like when we finally did, yet when the time came I was clinging to any resemblance of the place I'd left behind. It was stable there. Familiar. Comfortable.

I won't say that I'm fully adjusted to life in Dallas. The highways still terrify me and sometimes I still get overwhelmed by the amount of people that can fit into one place. But I know that God loves this city. He loves the people here and the people passing through here and He wants to plant us here long-term to reflect that love. I don't know all the plans, but my prayer for the rest of this first year is that the Holy Spirit would help me lay down my life and obey without trying to figure out the details.

Ecclesiastes 11:5- "As you do not know the path of the wind or how life enters the body formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of the Lord, the Maker of all things."