Plan "See"

I was drowning.

My body was on fire, stabbing pains echoed through my ribcage, an invisible weight was crushing my chest, and I was so weak that I had to consciously gather the energy needed to cough out the fluid that was drowning me. I knew I was in a battle for my life, and bacterial pneumonia wanted the trophy.

But this isn't about pneumonia, and it isn't about the six weeks it took me to recover. It isn't about how my husband single parented ten children, and it isn't about my renewed love for the television show Leave it to Beaver that was my only way to share time with my kids as I chose to take one labored breath after another.

It isn't about anything like that.

It's about where I thought I was supposed to be.

I am a planner. I love plans. I spend time in the shower calculating how many weeks it will take me to lose weight, or save money, or figuring out my schedule for the week for the sixth time. It brings me joy because I love thinking that I have everything under control.

And so, months before I stared pneumonia in the face, I had a plan. My Plan A was to attend the She Speaks conference in North Carolina. It was something I had been excited about for quite a while, and as the date loomed my excitement grew. I even entered a writing contest for a free ticket for that weekend.

Then I found out that a Precepts training that I had been planning on attending was that same weekend. This was really hard for me, as I was looking forward to going to the training with a few friends, and I needed to have the training in order to teach a class I wanted to lead for church.

So I came up with Plan B. If I won the contest, I'd go to She Speaks. If I didn't win, I'd go to the training. Seemed perfect to me. That would tell me what God's will was, right? If He wanted me to go to the conference, I'd win. If He wanted me to go to the training, I'd lose. Perfect.

Then I lost, and I was devastated. I allowed for a time for the disappointment to become personal; a personal attack against my writing skills and myself. It took me a few days to come back to the place where I understood that this was God's plan and started to get excited about what God obviously DID intend for me to do: the training.

Two weeks before I was supposed to leave, things started going wrong. I was sleeping all the time, coughing, not eating, and so weak that I had to take a break just walking from one end of a hallway to the other. The pneumonia diagnosis came shortly thereafter.

Guess what I was doing the weekend of the training? It wasn't Plan A, and it certainly wasn't Plan B.

I was doing Plan "See". "See" as in, we can't See what God wants for us. "See" as in, only God can See what our path is. "See" as in, stop putting God in a box and paying lip service to Him by saying that my plans are His plans!

I learned many valuable lessons during those weeks. But the most important one for me was the reminder that I am not the one who is in control. I don't get to give God options and let Him pick which one He likes best. It doesn't mean I don't have free will and the ability to make choices, but ultimately I am not the one who calls the shots. And I don't need to be.

I still have my Plan A and Plan B, but I now know that Plan "See", when it pops up, is a detour instead of a roadblock. And God's detours have some pretty awesome views.