No Plan B

Many thanks to many of you for your encouragement and prayers for my Bible Study last night! We had to cover a lot of things in just a little bit of time (but more time than usual because everyone was there on time and everyone stayed late...quite possibly for the first time EVER!) We had some great discussions and I think it went really well! 

One of the most surprising things of the night for myself was how emotional I became when we got to our last topic--singleness. I can't remember the last time I cried in front of this Bible Study. It had to have been at least 2 weeks. Ok, so I am a crier, and therefore, it wasn't really the tears that were unexpected, but maybe the reason for them...

The primary resource I gave out on singleness was an article written by Paige Benton Brown called Singled Out by God for Good. This article is jam-packed with humor and jam-packed with truth-- the truth of who God is and who we are in light of him. She talks about how while singleness, whether permanent or temporary, is most often not what we had planned for ourselves, it is not that way with God. In his goodness there is no Plan B. 

 Can God be any less good to me on the average Tuesday morning than he was on that monumental Friday afternoon when he hung on the cross in my place? The answer is a resounding NO. God will not be less good to me tomorrow either because God cannot  be less good to me. His goodness is not the effect of his disposition but the essence of his person- not an attitude but an attribute....

...I am single because God is so abundantly good to me, because this is his best for me. It is a cosmic impossibility that anything could be better for me right now than being single.

My tears came last night because as I was talking to "my girls" that I love so much, I realized how how beautifully and gloriously true these words were, how amazing this truth is. 

I remember my Plan A when I was their age: I was going to go to college and "date around" for the first two years. Then my junior year, I was going to meet some cute polo-wearing boy who loved Jesus and wanted to be a pastor. We were going to date for 2 years and get married upon graduating from college. Shockingly (or not so much), I had no plans for after the wedding. After that you just live "happily every after" right?

Well, this wasn't my story. My Plan A didn't really work out. 

My junior year of college I didn't meet some cute-polo-wearing boy. Instead that summer, I met dozens of soffee-short-and flip-flop-wearing middle school girls. It wasn't some boy with a winning smile that stole my heart, but a bunch of little girls with braces on their teeth. Upon graduating from college, I wasn't going to PCPC for my wedding, but rather for my job. 

My last 2 years of college, and my five plus years beyond haven't been defined by one significant relationship as I had always dreamed and hoped, but by dozens and dozens of equally significant ones! 

In what I possibly would have considered my Plan B, God has graciously allowed me be in the lives of scores of teenage girls... girls who I have loved more than I ever thought possible, girls who has impacted my life more than I ever dreamed. 

As I looked out over my girls last night, in what was our final official Bible Study, what brought tears to my eyes was the reality that God had been so abundantly good, so overwhelmingly gracious to me in not giving me what I had always planned.

Instead, he gave me something I never knew I wanted. Something I never knew I would need. He gave me people that  I never knew I could love so much. He gave me something that if I had known how good it would be, it would have been my plan all along.

I am so thankful that God doesn't always give us our Plan A, but his! I am so thankful today that the Lord is not always in the business of giving us what we want, but rather giving us what is best. I am thankful that his thoughts are not our thoughts, and that his ways are higher, better than our ways. 

I am thankful for the path that he has taken me on... the path I never knew I wanted, but the path I'd never change! 

To all my girls I have known and loved, I couldn't be more thankful for you and would never trade all these years for anything, not for any boy!