Have you ever wanted something so intensely, so deeply and desperately, that it hurt? Of course you have. We all know that feeling, inherent and intrinsic, that stems from a goal, a wish, a desire. A want that's almost a need. Something you have worked towards, cried over, sweated and bled for, gave your heart to.
And then you don't get it.
You're passed over, rejected, turned away, denied. Suddenly, everything inside of you that was striving towards that thing is gone, and you're left all hollowed out and empty, miserable. You're adrift in the great sea of life.
I think about this often, and I worry about it even more. For every goal I've achieved and every success I've accomplished, I still worry that the few things in life that I truly and enormously want will not be granted to me. I worry about timing. I stress about my own work ethic. I contemplate every possible factor that may or may not happen. I obsess over questions of free will and fate and choices and destiny and how much of our own hands shape the lives that God has planned.
I tell myself constantly, "Man plans; God laughs." It's not much of a consolation. I'm terrified that God has other plans for me than what I have for myself.
I think of how Louis Martin wanted to become a hermit, and how Zélie Guérin wanted to become a nun, and God said no to both, provided them with a marriage, and watched in turn as they married and gave birth to one of the most influential saints of modern times, Thérèse Martin of Lisieux. And I think, how perfect. How wonderful it is that God's plans are greater than ours. We can't be trusted to know what we want.
And how much it must have hurt at the time for Louis to be turned away from the hermitage, and how pained Zélie must have been to be denied her habit. How can we see beyond our hurt? As parents, they gave birth to a saint, but what if, as a hermit and a nun, they could have become saints in their own right?
It seems we must empty ourselves, die to ourselves, die to our own wishes if that's not what God calls for. We must content ourselves in His plan, whether we can see it or not at the time. If I am to lose out on my goals, hopes, and dreams to give way to something greater, then I pray that I have the absolute courage and strength to do so. I don't have it now, and it may be that I am not called to need it, but I hope that I would be able to find it if necessary. And if I am to never know what purpose my life served until I am good and gone, then so be it. I must trust.
May God take the plans I have made for myself into His hands and shape them into that which He wants, and may I have the humility to see them in their own time, and to accept them with grace.
