Part 1 of "The Life I Thought It Would Be" series

This Isn't the Life I Planned

Part 1 of "The Life I Thought It Would Be" series

I had a picture in my mind of what my life would look like by now.

I suspect you did too.

It was not an unreasonable picture. It was built from hope and hard work and genuine faith — the kind of faith that believes if you do the right things, stay faithful, keep showing up, God will honor that. And so you make plans. You build toward something. You carry a vision of what is coming, and you give yourself to it.

And then life goes a different direction. Not always dramatically. Sometimes just quietly, incrementally, one closed door at a time. Until one day you look up and realize the life you are living, as good as it may be in many ways, is not quite the life you imagined. And something in you grieves that — even if you cannot fully explain why, even if you feel guilty for grieving it at all.

I know that feeling. I have lived inside it.

What I have come to understand is that this is grief. Real grief. As legitimate as any other kind.

But here is the problem: the church does not have a liturgy for it. We know how to mourn the loss of a person. We know how to show up with presence, prayer, and casseroles when someone dies. But we have very little language for the loss of a dream, a vision, a version of your life that never came to be. And so most people carry it in silence, tucking it underneath gratitude and faith and the daily business of keeping everything moving.

Unmourned grief does not disappear, though. It just finds somewhere else to live. It shows up as a low hum of dissatisfaction, a restlessness you cannot quite name, a wince when someone else steps into the thing you once believed was yours.

I have felt all of that. And I have learned, slowly, that the way through it is not around it.

Proverbs 16:9 says: A person's heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.

For a long time, I read that verse as pure comfort — God is in control, trust Him, end of story. And that is true. But I have sat with this verse long enough now to hear something else in it, too. Something tender.

God does not dismiss the plans of your heart. He does not look at the dreams you carried and call them foolish. He knows you made them. He knows what it costs to let some of them go. He was there when you built them, and He was there when they came apart.

The redirecting does not erase the planning. And the life you are actually living is not a consolation prize. It is the life He is in — fully, actively, redemptively in — even when it looks nothing like what you drew up.

That is not a small thing to hold onto. Some days it is everything.

So if you are reading this and something in you just recognized itself — if you felt, even for a moment, that someone finally put words to something you have been quietly carrying — I want you to know that you are not alone in it.

I am not writing this series from a distance. I am writing it from the inside of a life that has had its own detours, its own closed doors, its own moments of looking around and wondering how I got here and whether here is where I was supposed to land.

Grace has met me in those moments. Not always quickly. Not always in ways I expected. But it has met me.

And I believe it will meet you, too.

One thing to do today: Find a quiet moment and finish this sentence honestly — just for yourself, just between you and God: The life I thought I would have by now was... You do not have to show it to anyone. You do not have to resolve it. Just name it. Grief that has a name is grief that can begin to heal.

Next week: "When You Had to Close the Door" — the specific grief of ending something you built, and the loss that comes with walking away.