I admit that I am a guarded, reserved person. I hold my cards close to my chest strategically playing each part of my life as though I’m set on winning that hand of poker. Recently, I let my cards show and it was a moment when I finally allowed myself to want something so bad building hope in my heart like this… these cards, this plan, this something was…perfect. And the day came when I finally let those walls down to open myself up into wanting this plan and then in a moment my heart fell like those walls when I found out that it could never be mine.

All I could do was fall to my knees and pray, pray for what’s next. If I thought this was…perfect, then how can anything else be better? In that moment of shattered dreams, I learned to trust and trust that God knows better than me and has plan far more…perfect than what I could ever dream or imagine. In that moment of dreams being shattered, I find myself doing something that I never do…I find myself handing over my cards and allowing God to play my hand. It’s so hard to do because I often find myself thinking that I can do better and that I know better than God. In a sense telling God that I can be my own god in how I operate in my life because when I say I don’t need him, I am telling him that I know better than the all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipotent God. I promise you I am none of those things, so you think it would be easy to get that through my head that I need to trust and hand over control to a God who is all of those qualities.

After being shattered, I find myself picking up each broken piece like it’s a precious gift, turning it over in my hand to examine the uniqueness of each fragment and reflecting on how if it wasn’t broken I wouldn’t be either and I wouldn’t have learned to trust. As I gather each piece I find hope in a new dream, a dream that I have given over to God and trusted in His greater plan. I realize the beauty of the moment that sometimes it takes brokenness or being shattered to find how to let God make you whole again.

A Prayer

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.  I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Ephesians 3: 14-20