So I think most of us can agree that God is in the business of changing plans. Whether that means big life-altering plans or everyday, turn left instead of right plans. During our time in Malaysia and beyond into our travel day(s) to Guatemala I came face-to-face with the great Plan-Changer.
Now for those of you that don’t know me really well, I love plans. I love planning things, organizing, and making sure everything runs smoothly and goes exactly the way it should. I’ve learned on the race that it is hard to be a missionary in other countries and be a strict plan follower, so I have slowly learned to adapt to other people’s plans and schedules. However, when it comes to my future that is one plan I haven’t been willing to relinquish to anyone else, even the Lord.
A little bit of background. The World Race of course is a missions trip to reach those around the world in desperate nee of the love of Christ, it is also a discipleship program to build up men and women in their early twenties to early thirties who will come home changed and on fire for the Lord and do amazing things for His Kingdom wherever they are led. For me it also something else. It’s school. The Lord blessed me with the ability and opportunity to use the World RAce as my junior year of college so that I wouldn’t need to wait another year to graduate. Because of this opportunity I have known what life will look like for me after the race since day one.
For me life after the race looks like starting my senior year of college and then graduating. Now here is where the real planning comes in. Back in February when our squad was in Cambodia I started researching into graduate school and started thinking about if I would want to pursue that and what program I would want to apply to. By the end of the month I felt like I had a clear understanding of what direction I wanted to go in and I felt like God was being pretty clear about the path He wanted me to take, so I signed up for fall classes accordingly.
It seemed like my future was pretty much set and I was happy with where I was headed all throughout our time in Thailand. Then as I wrote in my previous blog the Father broke me down and I had to re-examine my relationship with Him at the start of April. Despite my struggles with my faith I was still feeling confident about my plan for school and I didn’t feel like it needed to be affected by my other problems. But of course God had a different plan.
At the start of our second week of ministry in Malaysia we had house fellowship with our host family. Our host gave a message and then he, his wife, and another pastor prayed over each one of us on the team. I ended up going last. I had bee nodding and agreeing with everything they had been saying about everyone else, but when they got to me I was so nervous. We had known this was happening that night all day and I knew, I knew, that when I stood up and they prayed for me that God was going to tell me that He was going to change all my plans. Don’t ask me why I felt that way I just did, and turns out I was right.
About halfway through the prayer I started to relax, sort of. They had mostly been saying things I’d heard many times before and then it was like a switch got flipped when our host’s wife said the words, “Everything is going to change, even what you have planned for your future. God will change it. God is going to change it right now. According to the desire of His heart”.
In that moment I knew it had been so silly of me to think that I could hold onto my plan and not give it over to God. What was even more silly was the fact that I was afraid to hear her say those words and have someone tell me that God was making His own plans…and they didn’t really match mine.
I feel like this lesson of letting go of my control and plan for my life has been a constant on the race and something I keep talking about, but clearly God has more to teach me about what it really means to let go in mind, body, spirit, and soul, not just in words.
So God was going to change the plan I had for my future. Great. Except not really, because I had no idea what that meant or what it was going to look like in reality. For the rest of the month I pondered my prophecy but didn’t really think too much of it until I was walking through the sand of Venice Beach during our layover in LA. While I was walking along, just looking out at the ocean, God brought to mind an opportunity I had considered a long time ago but had forgotten about because I had chosen to pursue the World Race instead of that path.
That opportunity is about as opposite from the plan I had set out leading to grad school as one could get. Now as I’m sitting here writing this blog, during the last three months of my race, I have no idea really what my plan looks like beyond arriving home safely and starting senior year. Am I okay with that? I guess so. I’d like to know what my future looks like, but then again would’t we all? Right now I’m grateful that the Lord doesn’t let planners like me know the whole story, because is we did we would miss out on the adventure of discovering all the twists and turns in our life paths that make life hard sometimes, but so much more worth living.
