“‘For I know the plans I have for you’ declares the Lord. ‘Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’.”- Jeremiah 29:11
What do you want to be when you grow up? It was a common question people asked when we were younger. It feels as though we spend most of our lives planning our futures. Every time we hear that question, we are forced to think about things that are ultimately out of our control. Being a senior in college, I’ve heard questions along these lines more than I can count. Everyone, including me, wants to know what’s next. The truth is, there is no way to predict the future and what lies ahead. Even with all the planning and preparation, God writes our stories and in the end, His will will be done – whether it aligns with your plans or not.
Oftentimes, maturity is an adventure in all things new. It includes a lot of transitions that we, although sometimes forced into, must learn to embrace for our benefit. The hardest thing about embracing change is letting go of what was. Not only letting go of what was, but letting go of what you thought the next step would look like. We tend to obsess over remaining comfortable so much so that we make plans for the future that don’t push us completely out of our comfort zone – only into different variations of it. The dangers of our comfort zone vary from complacency all the way to lack of exposure. We become experts in mediocrity and stagnation all out of fear and sometimes just plain laziness. Embracing change in a way that makes you receptive to any and all possibilities equip you for a period of growth that you might not have previously been anticipating.
Being receptive to change and things being different and unfamiliar is difficult many reasons – it’s different and you don’t know what the future holds. Being okay with things being different and unfamiliar can be made easier to accept by understanding one obvious but sometimes difficult truth – God’s plans are to prosper us. There are many scriptures and phrases that we can use to combat our fear and opposition to all things new. My favorite is “the will of God will never take you, where the grace of God won’t protect you.” One thing we must understand is that unmerited favor we receive from God, that is ultimately grace on a daily basis, protects us from things seen and unseen. In this case, our new endeavors are our unseen battles that we will face, but never alone. God is with us in our fear and uncomfortability. A quote that I heard recently was “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.” To doubt the blessings that come with change is to doubt God when He is ultimately the one who has brought about this change. Throughout all the changes we go through, God is the one that stays consistent. Through His consistency and what we read about Him in the Bible, we have a known God. Every time I made plans for myself, got attached to those plans, and it didn’t end up working out, it was God who turned my situations around and used them to bloom me into who I am. His plans turned out to be better than I could even imagine. So knowing that, there would be no reason to doubt God going into this new season of my life. Trusting God means relinquishing control to Him, which I admit can be a really hard thing to do, but He knows what’s best for us – far more than we do. We try to avoid change by creating elaborate plans without knowing the victories and defeats that are ahead of us, but one thing we can depend on is that God is with us through it all. Changes and transitions are a lot scarier to face alone, but when you trust that God goes before you, you see things through a completely different lens.
