My Plan

Why is it that when you tell people you've lived through something traumatic, their response is "God must have big plans for you!"

Is it because they truly believe that to be true or is it just a generic answer that they give?  I tend to think it's a generic response that they use in their own mind to justify and redeem what you have been through so that they can better understand it....even though they probably can't.

I hear it so often, that I've developed quite a blase response.  How do they know?  If God had a big plan for me, why would He be withholding it?  Why would a God who loves me withhold something good from me, especially when it's something that makes me feel so terribly bad?

You see why such a simple statement could do little to build my confidence in a God who supposedly loves me? 

I don't think that this week has much to do with how I am feeling today.  In fact, the way I feel might actually be driving me to have a more emotionally trying week and why I'm having an even more difficult time with my birthday.

If you have kids, have a job, have grand kids, have people who rely on you, you probably have a good idea where you will be needed and a general idea of what you will be doing.  You know before your feet hit the floor or inhale a deep breath of fresh morning air, that you will be needed in some way that day.

Think about how you would feel to not wake up with those purposes everyday.  I think it's fair to say you might feel a little useless.

That is how I feel every single day.  I wake up not thinking, but knowing that I don't have any real driving reason to put my feet on the floor or take that first deep breath of the day. 

There is nobody who depends on me, nobody who needs me, nobody who really expects anything from me on a regular basis.  I have no place where I contribute anything of any value.  My uselessness is my reality.

If I were to disappear today, there would be nobody deeply affected outside of my husband who would feel the loss of my presence at home.  Sure, many people might acknowledge my previous existence, but deeply affected....no.

Really, this isn't a life that I can look at and believe that God has big plans.

Yes, there is a very real part of this that comes from my past.  I was made to believe that my life had no value and everyone would have been better off if I had never been born.  Those things were said and proven so many times for so many years, that I cannot easily drop those thoughts and walk away.  But this is much more. 

All day, I have mentally scoured my life to find one little shiny nugget hiding in a dark corner and I just couldn't. 

Each time I try to do, give, or be a resource for an individual or group of people, I am usually rejected.  I'm not ragging on church, but that's one place I've felt this.  I have volunteered to help in so many places and been turned away.  Each time I've reached out to a fellow Christian who was hurting or offered to help during a time of need, I've been rejected.  I'm not sure why, but it happens that way all the time.

If my past somehow makes me more equipped to carry out some big God plan, then I'm failing.  How can I possibly use what I've been through when I don't have a way to do that?

One thing I know is true and that nothing is hidden from God.  I can logically deduce that God obviously knows how big of a struggle this is for me.  I know He knows just how far down my feelings of uselessness push me into the hole of darkness. 

Maybe there isn't some big plan.  Maybe those people are wrong.  People misuse Jeremiah 29:11 as proof that God has big plans for people like me.  When in reality, the verse says that He knows the plans for us.  Not that they are big plans; not that they are plans to use your past trauma; not that the plans are even good.  Just that He knows the plans.

What if this is all there is to my life?  No end in sight of day after day of going through the motions and pretending that everything will somehow make sense someday.  What if this is the big plan?  What if the plan for my life is for it to be a short one?  What if the plan for my life is that I am supposed to be this disgusted with life?  What if my life doesn't have any value and God's just waiting for the right time for it to be over? 

If God knows everything already, He knows my plan, then who's to say that this is the way it's just supposed to be.

I think God probably already knows how our lives will end, regardless of what we plan.  I also think I'm tired of the deep breath in the morning that quickly turns into a big sigh.