How Life Was Supposed To Be

Getting married relatively young and immature, I went into marriage and parenthood with many blind spots and thus,  had very idealistic and romantic notions about how life was supposed to turn out for me.  The truth is that I thought I deserved to have everything in life that I wanted.  Of course, I knew that I had to love and follow God, but I was ALSO supposed to get everything I longed for because I was a good girl and I deserved it.  (hahahahaha!)  Suffering was supposed to be for other people because I was going to dodge all sorts of hardship.  It just wasn't going to be in my cards.

Everything was going exactly as I had planned until Marcus came along.  Needless to say, my life imploded and crashed into my gut.  My legs came out from under me because I wasn't supposed to encounter trials that big.  To be utterly honest, Marcus represents so many things that weren't supposed to be for me.

I wasn't supposed to endure such deep heartache for my child.  I wasn't supposed to face so much uncertainty about the future.  My weekly schedule wasn't supposed to work around hours and hours of therapy.  I wasn't supposed to worry about using our finances for medical/therapy expenses.  I wasn't supposed to stop having kids after two because of the possibility of having more children affected with a rare genetic syndrome.  I wasn't supposed to have my child undergo yearly tests to check for organ failure.  I wasn't supposed to expose my child to braille because of potential vision loss.  I wasn't supposed to shop for wheelchairs or walkers or have to carry my child everywhere when all his friends were running around.  I wasn't supposed to wonder if my firstborn would feel overly burdened in caring for her brother after Mike and I passed on.

God could have just kept my thoughts in this nasty pool of selfishness and pride.  But what I've begun to understand is that all the "supposed-to-be's" were really false lovers I was chasing when my One True Love was caring for me all along.  By His unmerited grace, I'm seeing that what Marcus really represents is  how deep, how wide, how strong, how lavish, how beautiful His love for me really is.  All the heartache and helplessness and despair I've felt because of Marcus were really gentle strokes of grace from God to help me see that He's already satisfied my desires through Christ.  That no other earthly joy, no matter how good, can compare to the fact that God inflicted His own perfect beloved Son so that His blood could pay the price to adopt me as His own child.  That although I've been so unfaithful while chasing false lovers, God looks upon me as He looks upon His own Son because I now belong to Him.

I still wrestle with all that I want for myself, my children, my family...on a moment by moment basis.  And to be honest, I won't be free from these idols until I'm with the Lord in Heaven.  But at the core, I am gripped by how gracious God has been to me.  That through Marcus, he has given me and my family the unique and precious privilege to be brought low, and consequently, Christ looks so much more beautiful now.  Yes, my life today isn't what I had planned or how I imagined it to be.  It is so much more rich and I am so much more aware of how fierce God's love is for me.