Altered

Three years after graduating seminary, I sat in a booth for breakfast across from an elder at the church where I had been on staff in Oklahoma. The restaurant was polluted by the warm smell of greasy bacon and half cooked hash browns. At this particular breakfast, he asked me if I had given any thought to my ten-year plan. Between my bites of over-easy eggs and sips of coffee, I explained that in ten years I would like to be a lead pastor of a church. Before then, perhaps in two to three years, I wished to transition out of student ministry into teaching adults. I knew I also needed to grow more in church administration and leadership during this time. As any young and wide-eyed twenty-something feels as they embark upon their career, I felt a lot of hope and excitement for my future.

Two years after that breakfast, I sat in a booth across from the same man for breakfast in the same bacon sullied restaurant. The same marked air of greasy bacon and half cooked hash browns lingered as it did years before, but everything else had changed. I had just arrived back in town after having left Heidi in rehab. Having to know I was discouraged, he invited me to breakfast. Two years earlier at our breakfast, we had talked about my ten-year plan. This breakfast, we talked about grief. And, what I didn’t know at the time, was also the looming and quickly coming loss of my own dream.

I understand grief to be the suffering of some sort of loss. In my case, the loss of how I thought my life was going to go. My marriage. My ministry. My mission. My ten-year plan. I naïvely thought I was going to change the world after seminary, remember? This man was a recently retired professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the university in town. He told me how he used to teach a section to his students over grief. In our conversation, he shared how he taught students that everyone has “dreams” about how their life is supposed to turn out, but when a mom finds out her dream baby is deaf, sometimes the grief is too much to bear.

He told a story of a mother who had been all over to see countless doctors, desperately chasing a second, a third, and a fourth opinion for her child. Every time the news was the same. “Ma’am, your child is deaf.” She wouldn’t have it. She couldn’t accept it. She was unwilling to let go of her dream. She was unwilling to let go of the way she had always pictured her children and her family. She never pictured a deaf child. Her life had been drastically altered, and she was unwilling to accept it. This mom needed to wake up to the fact that her dream was over. Life had handed her something entirely different than she had planned. She was blindsided for sure, but she needed to wake up to the reality that her child was indeed deaf.

Like this devastated mother, you may need to wake up as well and accept that the dream is over. Life as you had pictured it will not happen entirely or perhaps at all now. If you are reading this, there is a good chance you are suffering or a loved one is suffering in some way. You may have lost your job. You may have lost your marriage. Perhaps you yourself are struggling with the existential boredom Heidi felt in Dallas and coping with it in all the wrong ways. Perhaps those close to you keep telling you you’re not yourself lately and you need to talk with a counselor. A loved one of yours may be abusing pills. Maybe you are finding yourself abusing alcohol. That beer after work has turned into ultimatums from your spouse or probation from your boss. Life is altering into something you never dreamed of for yourself. The first thing you need to do is wake up. Whatever has hit you to drastically alter your life I'm sure did not fit into your ten-year plan, but the longer you hold on to your dream, the longer you will miss out on God’s dream. It is time to surrender your dream life for His dream for your life.

You and I never would have chosen this calling, but this is our calling. The God of the universe is calling us into a messy, wild adventure of suffering and grace; rejection and redemption. I know you may not like the sound of being called to suffer. Yet sin has fouled up everything. Sin has fouled up your loved one’s mind, your dream, your finances, or perhaps your friendships. Since it has fouled up everything, suffering is now inescapable. The suffering that is inescapable is wreaking havoc in your life, and worst of all, you know it has forever altered your life in some way. I get it. Believe me, I do. You are angry that God is not delivering on the dream life you trusted Him for. Now is the time to begin accepting that the dream is over. Your life has been drastically altered, and God has a different outcome for your life than you originally conjured. The outcome may be different than you originally dreamed, but still an outcome amazing and beyond what you could have ever dreamed for yourself. He wants to leverage the suffering that has drastically altered your life to radically alter you.

At that time, when we sat for breakfast and discussed grief, two years earlier I had hoped to be transitioning in my career as a pastor, but in just three months I would no longer even be a pastor. My ten-year plan was gone. God had crossed it out. He put a big fat line right through it. Accepting the loss of a dream, however, has been beyond the best thing we could have dreamed to happen for ourselves. And it will be the same for you too.

Maybe you need to cross out your ten-year plan as well. Maybe you need to put a big fat line through it and accept a different plan, God’s plan for you. God sent His one and only Son to die and live again so your dream life could die and you truly live for Him. Hopefully, by reading our wild story, you’ll find that God desires to use your suffering to radically alter your life into something you never dreamed it could be. One day, God willing, you will find yourself thanking God for your suffering because it has made you more like Jesus and there is no greater unforeseen joy you can experience than that. You will sound like the psalmist who wrote, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn Your statutes" (Psalm 119:71 NASB).