When Life Doesn’t Look The Way You Thought It Would
“’For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’” – Isaiah 55:8-9
One of the hardest things you have to do in life is to adjust to finding yourself in circumstances you did not plan to be in or that you do not want to be in. We often have dreams of what we thought our life would look like.
We dream of the perfect job, working in a career of our choice with great colleagues and a comfortable salary. We dream of a certain house, in a certain zip code, with specific dimensions and perfect furniture. We dream of the perfect family, consisting of the perfect relationship, 2.5 kids, a dog, and a 3-car-garage.
But then real life happens, and you have to figure out what to do when our lives don’t turn out the way you thought they would. Your dream job turns into a nightmare. The house you want is way out of your price range. The great marriage comes with unimaginable challenges. And for some reason when this happens, you conclude that these broken dreams couldn’t possibly be God’s will for your life. You assume that God’s plan must be in some other setting, with better circumstances, a bigger salary, a nicer house, no stress, no drama, and relational bliss.
This assumption can get us into some major trouble, because by assuming we know better than God, we could be missing out on what He has down the road for us. Not to mention, we have no idea what God could be protecting us from by not giving us what we thought we wanted.
As the popular passage in Isaiah reminds us, the Lord’s thoughts and the Lord’s ways are so much higher than our own. Let’s choose to find peace in that truth and trust that even when life doesn’t look the way we thought it would, God has something better than anything we could have thought of on our own.
One of the hardest things you have to do in life is to adjust to finding yourself in circumstances you did not plan to be in or that you do not want to be in. We often have dreams of what we thought our life would look like.
We dream of the perfect job, working in a career of our choice with great colleagues and a comfortable salary. We dream of a certain house, in a certain zip code, with specific dimensions and perfect furniture. We dream of the perfect family, consisting of the perfect relationship, 2.5 kids, a dog, and a 3-car-garage.
But then real life happens, and you have to figure out what to do when our lives don’t turn out the way you thought they would. Your dream job turns into a nightmare. The house you want is way out of your price range. The great marriage comes with unimaginable challenges. And for some reason when this happens, you conclude that these broken dreams couldn’t possibly be God’s will for your life. You assume that God’s plan must be in some other setting, with better circumstances, a bigger salary, a nicer house, no stress, no drama, and relational bliss.
This assumption can get us into some major trouble, because by assuming we know better than God, we could be missing out on what He has down the road for us. Not to mention, we have no idea what God could be protecting us from by not giving us what we thought we wanted.
As the popular passage in Isaiah reminds us, the Lord’s thoughts and the Lord’s ways are so much higher than our own. Let’s choose to find peace in that truth and trust that even when life doesn’t look the way we thought it would, God has something better than anything we could have thought of on our own.
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