For most of my life I have known that God has a plan for my
life. This fact should be very
reassuring and encouraging, but for many years, knowing that God has a plan for
my life has filled me with anxiety and has left me in fear of not following God’s
plan for my life.
I believed that God has one very specific and exact plan for
the way I am supposed to live my life. I
imagined that God had laid out my life and I needed to essentially read God’s
mind in order to figure out what to say, what to think, where to go, where to
stay, and what to wear so that I would please God and live the life God wanted
me to live. I thought making one wrong
choice, one mis-step, one incorrect action would forever alter my life in a way
that would never allow me to get back on the “right” path that God had intended
me to walk down.
And it was never the worry of making bad choices that gave
me such anxiety. I’ve never been one to
consider recklessly breaking laws, repeatedly partying hard through the night
and ditching class in the morning, or doing other such things that would
detrimentally affect my life. The
decisions that filled me with anxiety were decisions between doing two or more
good things. Decisions like: should I
join the Peace Corps or should I go to graduate school to study social
justice? Or should I apply to work at
Non-profit Organization A or Christian Organization B?
I often felt paralyzed and unable to make any decision
because I was so afraid of making the wrong decision.
To some extent I’ve wanted to hold on to the belief that God
has one specific plan for my life: a second-by-second plan to living the life
God intended for Melissa. If I could
just figure out a way to read God’s mind and know what that second by second
plan is, life would be so easy…
But I’ve come to understand that God’s plan for my life is
more about WHO God wants me to be and less about WHAT God wants me to do. If I am the person God wants me to be then I
will naturally do the things God wants me to do.
God wants me to be a person who loves and serves God and
likewise loves and serves other people.
God wants me to be a person who seeks justice and leads other people to act
in ways that bring about justice in this world.
And God wants me to be a person who has hope and spreads that hope that
one day the Kingdom of God will be fully present on earth.
Perhaps it is the case that God has a detailed plan laid out
for my life. I’m not opposed to this
idea, but I’ve found such freedom in relinquishing the idea that I need to figure
out and follow some unknown to me second-by-second and step-by-step plan.
So for now my plan is to trust and be. I’m going to trust
that God has a plan for my life and try to be the person I think God wants me
to be.
