Sound of Surviving Blog

As we are about to enter into the new year, I find myself looking back on this year, reflecting on what I’ve done, on who I’ve become. It’s funny, seeing memories come up from past years at this time, causing me to ponder over the ways I’ve grown.

 I wonder how the way I pictured myself and the way my life would go could change so much over the years.

Sometimes it feels cruel, like God has stripped away all of the ways and things I could define myself by. My life isn’t going the way I’d always hoped it would when I was younger, and many dreams have been ripped by their seams from my hands. It feels like watching pieces of a vision board being torn away, crumpled up, and tossed into a trash can, not because I’ve accomplished them, but because they now feel unattainable. But I read a quote the other day that changed my thinking on this. It read, “Maybe your problems aren’t too big, maybe they’re too small. God wants you to believe him, and trust him for greater things.”

I see now, that he’s not taking away pieces of me, but is actually adding to the bigger picture. I often feel like God has taken away all of the big dreams and goals I once had for my life, but maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe those were the small things. Maybe he’s just making room for the real big things in my life, like a mosaic. Maybe his removing those dreams that my past self had, is really just making room for me to see the bigger picture, the bigger plan that he has for me, for my life. Maybe this stripping away of the old, as Paul notes in Colossians 3:9, is God’s way of preparing me for the plans he has for me; This is his way of giving me a clearer point of view, to help me see that I was meant for greater things. There are two other quotes I love that remind me of this. “You were made to do hard things,” and Max Lucado’s statement, “God never said the journey would be easy, but he did say the arrival would be worth it.”  We were created not to simply achieve the easy or the small things, but to conquer the momentous, and the impossible.

So, as  I go into this new year with many resolutions, my biggest resolution of all will be learning to trust God, and to fully believe him when he says in Jeremiah 29:11, “ For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for good, and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”