Summer. I remember as a little girl spending Summers in my back yard gardening, swimming, dreaming. Sometimes I would lie face-up to the clouds and watch as they drifted and shifted shapes, all-the-while trying to imagine what life would be like all grown-up. I dreamed about the man I would marry. I wondered if I would have any kids. What kind of job would I have? Where would I be living? The imagined answer was always someplace exciting, some place exotic. I never imagined fading polaroid pictures of a lost childhood.
I never imagined life interrupted.
I could not have dreamed that at 12 I would greet police officers at our front door who would whisk me from the only home I had ever known. It only took twenty minutes to unravel the securities of childhood. The six years that followed were marked by three different foster homes. As a foster kid you always have a sense that you are just passing through. Foster didn’t mean real, at least not in the sense you could truly say you were “home”. Homes were just a place to stay, not a place to know you would get to grow up and remain. As a foster kid you just desperately longed to belong, somewhere…to someone. You notice the framed pictures on the walls of people who love and belong together. You also notice when your picture is absent, or not part of the full family picture at all. I could never have imagined growing up faster than I should ever have had to.
We don’t daydream the hard.
We imagine life in pleasant places and fenced in just the way we would like. But life doesn’t happen in the expected ways or in the ways we anticipate. I could continue on with a long list of ways I didn’t anticipate life: a failed engagement, infertility, loss and deaths, a recent miscarriage…life has been full of it’s share of storms and rain as opposed to sunny days, though there have been an abundance of those too. I just didn’t plan on the broken roads that would lead me to them.
But in the broken there was God.
Always…God was always there. In pain, in suffering, God has taught me an invaluable lesson. Trust. In the hard of life, in the uncontrollable parts of nearly everything that is life, God has forged trust. Unshakeable, hope-filled trust. It’s not the trust that just sees God is good when things are good. It’s the trust that sees beyond the circumstance, even in the hard and KNOWS God is good. Trust is the ability to see the unshakeable reality of who God is, of what He has done and is doing. Trust enables us to cling to God and all He has promised. He has never, not once, broken a promise. He has promised us He will come again and right everything that is so very wrong and upside down with this world.
This world is not all there is.
Life is temporal. In the grande scheme of eternity, the here and now is but a fading polaroid picture. Psalm 119 reminds me not only of the sovereignty of who God is, or the supremacy of His Word, but that trials have purpose. In trials we meet with lament, and lament forges deeper trust. I could never have pictured beauty like that in ashes but God does. 30 years ago I was on the verge of turning 8. 30 years ago I could never have known how much BETTER my life would be because Christ would step in and interrupt it. Easy? No. But better? Yes-far, far better. Because God forged trust. I had plans, yes. But God has better ones. I’m trusting in that.
“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a FUTURE and a HOPE.” ~ Jeremiah 29:11