Dear 20-year-old me,
I know so much of life looks black and white right now. At least, you wish it did. And when it doesn’t, you try to make it that way; it’s your way of making sense of the world. It would be so much easier if God just handed you the blueprint, wouldn’t it? It would be easier to follow “the plan”.
But God is too good for that; too kind. He wants relationship with you too much to hand you a blueprint and let you walk away.
Because that is what you’d do. You’d follow the blueprint (maybe), do the steps, and forget what faith was meant to be.
Instead, He gives you the next step, just the next step – no more and no less. He gives you enough to obey and too little to become independent.
You try to live apart from Him sometimes, don’t you? I was there. I saw it. I did it. But living on your own wisdom and by your own desire will only leave you wondering once again if your life has purpose and value. It will leave you questioning if what you do actually matters.
So He holds onto the plan in His divinely loving hands, metering out the amount you can handle for the season you’re in. At twenty, the world looks so big and full of options you desperately want direction. You want to know, in all these choices, if you’re making the right one.
But the right choice – at twenty, and in ten years – is to choose faith. It’s to walk into the open unknown of the future trusting that the next step is enough. Simple as that step is, it’s the key to where He’s taking you. If you don’t want to obey Him in the unknown, why would you obey Him with a blueprint?
Dear girl, God isn’t hanging you out to dry. His silence is not His absence, as Oswald Chambers so wisely said. But His quietness IS a call for you to press into your walk with Him… to shut off some noise so you can actually hear His voice. In the hectic spin of college and dating and friendship and jobs it’s so easy to put Him last or fit Him into the corners of your day, but everything – everything – depends on Him.
You depend on Him. And one day you’ll need Him desperately, even if you don’t feel like you do today.
So embrace the wildness of your season, the gray areas that litter every step, and learn to listen to the Spirit of God in you. Black and white isn’t always His way. More often than not, His way is through the confusing and the impossible, because that’s where you’re most likely to hold His hand.