Life’s Plan B’s

Have you ever prayed about a big life event and felt like you got ‘Plan B’ for an answer? Some prayers are like that. You feel like you didn’t get the answer you wanted. You might even feel like the good good Father is giving all the good good gifts to His other kids, but not to you. Those are the prayers that demand trust that He knows best. Many of my prayers have fallen in this spectrum, but one became the largest chapter of my life story.

I was 28 years old and felt like real life was just about to get started. We had invested our first ten years of adulthood preparing for it. Our son had arrived, morphing us from couple to family. We dragged ourselves over the academic finish line, two exhausted parents, just wanting to get jobs and launch comfortable normal lives at last.

A few months before graduation, we began to send out resumes and sign up for campus interviews. We prayed hard that God would help us find the right jobs in the right place. We asked Him to open the doors He knew were best and close the ones that weren’t.

Then we began to collect rejection letters. We had a friend who wallpapered his living room wall with his rejections. Ours went into a folder that accumulated disappointments. The next few months tested our faith, as we waited and trusted and panicked and waited and trusted and panicked.

And then three good job offers came through in my technology field. Two offers were in the Midwest where we wanted to live, close to our  families. One was a 15 hour drive away, in an industry I hadn’t envisioned working in. It was in a city we had visited before in sweltering August. We may have used the word “never” as our deodorant melted into trickles sliding from our pits down to our waistline. It was where we knew exactly zero people. And it turned out to be the only option that could pair with the location of my husband’s post-doctoral offer.

We didn’t feel like we had much of a choice, so we accepted these opportunities. We hoped this would just be for a few years and then we could move closer to home and get different jobs and find the normal life we had expected. Plan A.

I’m not sure how it even happened, but thirty years have gone by. We still live here, both retired from careers we didn’t expect to have, living a Plan B we didn’t expect to live. Our daughter was born Texan here. We visited our family as often as we could, but also made friendships that grew into our local family. We embraced the state traditions of BBQ and bluebonnet fields of Plan B. We learned to say “ya’ll.” Our children found their soulmates here. It was almost as if it was meant to be.

It WAS meant to be. Because that’s what happens when you pray and leave the outcome to His all-knowing wisdom. Proverbs 16:3-4 says it well:

Commit your work to the LORD and your plans will be established. The LORD has made everything for its purpose, … [Prov 16:3-4, ESV]

I’m guilty of placing a lot of confidence in my own plans. I can find it challenging to leave the outcome to God. Sometimes it looks like He doesn’t know what He’s doing. But I have learned to trust that He sees everything in my future, while I can only speculate about it. I have learned to trust that He knows what is best for me, when it doesn’t seem best to me. I have learned that trust doesn’t mean an absence of fear, disappointment or sadness, but a belief that He’s with me. I have learned He’s working out what I cannot yet see. Sometimes it just takes some time to see it.