I am a monster plot guesser.

Surprise parties, surprise visits, surprise gifts – I’m sorry friends and family, but more times than not, I’ve seen them coming. Context clues, body language, the absence or particular presence of certain people – I use it all to make guesses about people I know and don’t know. I think about the subtext of the subtext of what someone says, the tone of their voice and the breaks in their speech as well as what they are saying and not saying.  I pick up on people turning their heads certain ways or walking into rooms with a particular attitude, how they look at another when talking to them, how they look/act when they think no one is paying attention to them. Yes, I am a crazy people watcher/ listener, but as a writer, I think that’s part of my job. (Remember this post from a long time ago?)

I can also claim an embarrassing number of research hours spent watching tv that now allows me read a scene and the characters in it like nobody’s business. From just a few words and glances, I can predict how what just happened will affect the plot for episodes to come. That being said, there is one story that has me stumped – fully and completely. I can’t see around the signs much less string them together to predict what’s happening next. The story I’m talking about is my own.

When I was a kid, I fully excepted to 1) go to Baylor, 2) meet my future husband at Baylor, 3) study something super stable with a clear career path, 4) get married not too long after graduation, 5) settle down somewhere in the DFW area and 6) let life gently unfold with a family and everyday happenings. Well, depending on how well you know me, you may be chuckling  as you realize that only one of those six items has been checked off my childhood’s adult to-do list.  My life is wildly, even laughably, unlike the plot that I conjured up when I was young.

I wanted a stable road, people. And I think that’s pretty natural. We dream what we know. We keep to the brightly lit paths, safe and controlled, because we like the ability of calling all the shots. But God plans lives we can’t imagine. You know that saying, “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone?” Well, what if real, God-led lives begin at the end of our own life plans? Think of all the characters in the Bible whose lives ended up completely different than they planned: Abraham left his country for a foreign one and  fathered TWO people groups. Moses, who ran away to the desert, became the leader of a nation’s exodus. A young boy whose mom made him lunch helped to feed thousands. Paul who lived for the sanctity of Judaism switched teams to spread the story of Jesus Christ in places he probably never imagined seeing with his own two eyes.

When I was little, I imagined going to Baylor, marrying after graduation and settling down, but instead, I moved to Paris. I am compelled to write and willingly lay my heart out for the world to see when I grew up a blushing wallflower. It doesn’t make sense. This is not who I intended to be, who I was comfortable with becoming. Thanks be to God that He had something far more off-kilter in mind.

My plan was not to be 25, single and career-less. Yet at the same time, as a kid I never thought about a life and identity fully in Christ. I think I envisioned things going how I wished them to with God sweetly and quietly lingering in the background. But God does not do background. Instead, He calls us into greater extremes then we imagine, because He fully knows what we merely feel fleeting stings of : that we were created to be so much more than this world persuades and cajoles us to be. The story that He is telling with my life isn’t what I could have predicted (and I still don’t have much of a clue where it is going), but like bread crumbs on a trail, it’s my hope that what few signs I have picked up are leading me down His path.  And I wonder if perhaps He’s up ahead ,smiling at how much I don’t know, taking care that it remains a surprise because it’s just too great a story to give away now.

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Have you ever thought about your own story? God is there in the midst of it, I promise. Would you have imagined your life as it is now when you were a kid?