One of the things that I think is easy for “Christians” to do is to expect certain things out of God. We’re told that God will make our lives so much better… that following him is a cure-all for everything that ails us and that if we don’t get what we want out of him, we are somehow at fault… not holy enough, not full of enough faith. This is definitely the way that I grew up believing. And to a point, yes, it’s true… God does make everything better. But he also has a grand master plan that we can’t always understand, especially when we’re living right through the middle of it and sometimes that plan involves a lot of suffering and questioning and pain. It’s kind of like child birth. There’s a WHOLE lot of suffering involved, but in the end, that pain was the only thing that could get us to the happy ending. I think God sees the long view when we are stuck right in the middle of our stories, in the doldrums of life. He sees what the outcome will be, he sees what a tool pain is in our lives and that’s why I think he doesn’t mind if we suffer a little.

The one, and maybe only, thing I know about God is that he is good. Only good. All the time. Whenever I find myself riding the wave of uncertainty (almost always), wondering where he’s taking me, I remind myself over and over again that he is only good. And also that he knows better than me, that he’s looking at the whole picture when I can only see a tiny corner of it. When my marriage was falling apart, I fully expected God to fix it because in my mind that was the only thing that could be good. And since my marriage being fixed was good + God is good, that should equal me getting my way. Gosh how thankful I am that I didn’t get my way. (Don’t count on me saying THAT sentence very often.)

I’m starting to get tiny glimpses of the long view, the big picture and I just can’t get over how thankful I am that I had to endure some pain to get to where I’m going. Stuck right in the middle, I couldn’t see how much better things could be if only I’d let go of my stubborn determination to have things the way I thought they should be. Now I just think of God as this really patient and totally brilliant father who says, “Yeah, sure we could go that way, but the story is going to be SO much better if we go this way. It might be hard, but going my way will change the entire outcome for the rest of your life and it will be SO worth it.”

Um, it is.

And all this time I had been stamping my foot, demanding my own way when his was so much better. I kind of think that God doesn’t like to be told what to do. I think that when we set up all these expectations for how we want him to move, he just has to blow our minds a little by doing it totally different. (Hello, theme of my life.) I think it’s his sense of humor and adventure. I love that about him. It’s like he, himself, is a little irreverent.

What I’m coming to believe is that I don’t want to know how my story is going to turn out anyway. I want to be surprised by the outcome. Every surprise so far has been SO good and SO fun and SO remarkable. I don’t want to read the end of the book before I finish the middle. I’m finding myself getting so content to ride the boat, not knowing where it’s going but that the adventure is going to be epic, that I’m going to be surprised over and over again, and that in the long run it is going to be SO good because the guy I finally let drive is SO good.

Giving up control over my life has been hard and it’s a lesson I have to remind myself of daily. But it’s been worth it… every single time it’s been worth it. And it will be worth it tomorrow and the next day and the next. THAT is something I know.