I woke up this morning feeling compelled to write this post. Bear with me - this is going to be a long one.
I am a planner. No, actually I am more of a controller than a planner. I don't have to have a plan, but I DO have a need to be in control. If you know me, you recognize this as true. Believe it or not, it used to be worse.
To understand this story, you have to travel back in time almost 20 years. In 1992 I found myself, much to my dismay, divorced from my husband of 8 years and the single parent to a 3 year old daughter. That daughter, I would have been proud to tell you, was the product of a planned pregnancy. And when I say "planned" I do mean planned. As in, I decided what 6-month span I wanted my child born in, taking into consideration future birthday parties and school age cut-off dates, and I allowed myself 6 months to get pregnant. I went off the birth control pill a month before my scheduled "conception window" began and put my plan into action. In the third month of the plan, I was pregnant. Well, of course I was! I had a plan, I did what needed doing, and I got the desired result. I conveniently forgot to run that little "plan" past God, much less ask His approval or consider what might be His will. I just assumed that His will would naturally align with mine.
Nine months and an amazingly smooth pregnancy later (other than my baby's refusal to show her gender during ultrasound and her stubbornness regarding birth position), baby Dana was born. She was absolutely beautiful! Now, I grew up without siblings around me until I was 15, when my little brother was born. I made a point of telling all my family members how I wasn't going to have a huge gap between my children. Uh-huh. My plan was to have about 2, no more than 3, years between my kids. And I would have two of them, preferably one boy and one girl. I had it all figured out. And then came the day in October 1991 (the day before Halloween - yes, I remember) that my then-husband told me he wanted a divorce. For one of the first times in my memory, something was happening that I couldn't control. Oh, I tried. I bought a pitiful book about how to win back a spouse who didn't love you anymore and I put a "plan" into action. I prayed - oh, how I prayed! I prayed for God to bring him back to me - basically for God to enforce my will for me. That was a dark time in my life and I see now that I could have easily slipped into depression except that I had a small someone who was depending on me to get us both through the mess and into the clearing beyond. Complicating my grief at the loss of my marriage (which is - let's be honest- the loss of an entire future) was the fact that my husband's leaving reopened all the wounds from my own parents' divorce when I was 4. I had a wonderful stepfather and a mother who did the best she could in a bad situation, but a kid just doesn't come through that experience unscathed no matter how amicable the divorce may be. Maybe that's one of the roots of my need to be in control.
So I bought the book and I prayed for MY will to be done, and.... nothing changed. At least not right away. And when the change came, it wasn't in my situation - it was in ME.
Part 2: coming soon!
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