Dancing Past Regrets
Published: October 05, 2009
Linda stared across the table at me, her eyes filled with tears. "If only I hadn't married him. If only I had just waited on God a little longer. But how could I have known?" The tears spilled out, along with her regrets from the past several years.
Linda was raising two children alone since her husband left a year earlier when he decided he no longer wanted the responsibility of taking care of a wife and children.
Linda had spent the past year recounting her "if onlys", beating herself over the head for not having figured out when she met him that her husband was the kind of man who would eventually leave. Yet I was there at Linda's wedding ceremony years ago and I, too, never would have seen it coming.
Shortly after my conversation with Linda, I got a call from Becky. She was lamenting over her upcoming 20-year high school reunion, and couldn't believe she would be attending it single. "How did I miss God's plan for me?" she asked, in frustration. "I can't imagine He'd want me to live out my life by myself."
I looked at my watch as the phone call came to an end. I was almost late for an appointment with Terry, who was agonizingly lonely in her 25-year marriage.
Linda. Becky. Terry. And sometimes you and me. We all forget, at times, that God knows all things - even the miserable things in our lives -- and can still bring the tangled threads of our lives together into a beautiful love story revolving around us and Himself. Yet we, as women, continue to blame ourselves and stress that we didn't get God's Plan A for our lives. And instead, we fear, we're living out the dreaded Plan B.
Have you ever considered that it's no accident that you are where you are today? Whether you're single and still waiting to be married, married but feeling alone, widowed earlier than you thought, or divorced and regretting that you somehow missed "God's best", none of it takes God by surprise. Your Maker, who fashioned you in your mother's womb, knew the circumstances that would play out in your life to cause you to feel frustrated, or alone. The Psalmist says God has written out our days in a book before we ever came to be. That means He has a plan - and purpose - in what we sometimes see as our pain or plight.
God doesn't have a Plan A for the majority of women - to get married and live happily ever after-and then a Plan B for the rest of us, which leaves us feeling that somehow we missed Plan A. No, God looked down through the corridors of time and knew what each of us would need to become more intimately connected with Him and then He ordained our days - overseeing our circumstances, directing our paths, and providing enough of Himself to be available to us when we feel we're at our wits' end - so that we would live that story and find Him as our all in all.
In Psalm 139, David sang this about the God who made him and planned out his life:
"You saw me before I was born.
Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed."
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Dancing Past Regrets
Published: October 05, 2009
Discover why nothing in life takes God by surprise.
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