I'm a planner. Not a to-do list type of planner because, let's be honest, anyone who knows me knows that I wait until the last minute to do everything, but a future planner. I matured pretty young, so from the time I was in elementary school I had already started cultivating ideas for what I wanted my life to be like. But the problem with making plans is that things rarely go as planned. And let me tell you one thing that you can't plan for - the feeling of emptiness that you experience when, for once, you don't have a plan.
You can't plan for waking up one day and just knowing that the person you're dating isn't the person that you want to marry one day. Because how do you tell someone who you've spent almost all of high school with, someone who your friends and family adore, that you have basically no reason to break up with them other than "I just know I can't spend the rest of my life with you" when you're only 17 years old?
You can't plan for when you don't get accepted into the school you've been set on since the 5th grade. It's two months left until graduation and everyone is finding their roommates and you still have no idea where you're even going. So, you accept defeat and find another school.
You can't plan for when you've finally gotten excited to move away and start college and then hate it once you get there. No one tells you that you will cry the first two weeks. Or that you begin to feel like there's just something "wrong" with you because everyone seems to be enjoying it except for you.
You can't plan for when you transfer home the next semester and hate it almost as much as being away, and then just feel trapped. I had always been the person who had it together, and then suddenly in what felt like the blink of an eye, I didn't. For once, I had no idea where I was supposed to be or what I was supposed to be doing.
God wrecked my plans.
Over and over again.
So finally, I decided just to fully hand it over. Not because it's the "Christian thing to do", but honestly because my plan A,B,C,D, etc. had failed.
When I decided to come to Liberty University, people thought I was crazy. Truthfully, even I thought I was crazy. It was WAY outside of what I could afford (by about $25,000 a year) and I only knew two people there. I distinctly remember someone saying to me, "You couldn't survive 4 hours away from home, how do you think you're going to survive 8?" And I honestly didn't know.
But one thing that I did know is that this is where God wanted me to be. There was an unexplainable peace that I had in my heart about leaving that I hadn't felt before because I was following His plan and not mine. And let me tell you, He provided more than I could've ever hoped for. I truly cannot imagine being happier than I am in this moment.
God wrecked my plans because they were my plans, and he knew that ultimately, my plans were going to wreck me.
And I'm so glad he did.