Not What I planned!

 

Recently I was watching my beautiful daughter playing and reflecting on our journey to becoming a family. At age three my beautiful little girl is still not quite walking yet and has few words beyond Mumma, Dadda, Good girl, the wiggles and cake – obviously the most important words! You see our perfect daughter has Down Syndrome, which means that she takes a little longer to do the things that come so easy to others. I smiled as she managed pulled a photo of her nana out of her photo bag, signed her name and clapped herself in congratulations and pondered on the truth that although this wasn’t what I had planned when I began my journey to become a mum, it was full of the golden threads of his grace.

 As many of you know my journey to motherhood wasn’t an easy one, in fact I became the step-mother to teenagers before we even tried to extend our own family! We journeyed through years of trying to extend our family but never getting anywhere. Eventually in 2018 we decided to pursue adoption and 9 months later our miracle finally came home to be with us. There we many ups and downs throughout the journey and at times it was far easier to wallow in self pity than to dust myself of and see God’s face along the way. One verse that I clung to throughout this time was psalm 113:9 in the passion translation it says:

God’s grace provides for the barren ones a joyful home with children

    so that even childless couples find a family.

    He makes them happy parents surrounded by their pride and joy.

    That’s the God we praise, so give it all to him!

This was not only a promise that I clung to but taught me a lot more about the nature of God and his plans for our lives. This verse doesn’t promise that everything will go just as we planned it, but it promises that he has something planned full of joy.

 One of the biggest lessons I learned in my journey to motherhood, and continue to learn as I look to the future is that when we are in relationship with God we have to surrender our picture of what we believe life should be like, trust in God and enjoy the blessings on the journey. As Isaiah 55:8-9 says:

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,

Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.

⁹ “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

So are My ways higher than your ways,

And My thoughts than your thoughts.

When I chose to surrender every area of my life to Jesus, including my desire to be a mum, I began to see around me things I would never have been gifted if my journey had been smooth. I found the amazing ministry of Moms in the making who call women into deeper relationships with God as they desire to become a mum (check them out here: ). I found the deep peace of living in obedience to Christ, even in the storm, I learned how God can take our darkest days and turn it into a testimony of God’s grace that encourages him to do it again in other people’s lives.

 When God called us to adoption, we knew that we wanted to make a difference in the life of a child who may not have had that opportunity otherwise, we trusted that God had his hand on the life of our future child. There was no doubt in our mind that as much as we had the privilege to choose our daughter, she was most certainly chosen by God for us.

 

In some ways I don’t know why this has been such a lesson to learn,  

I never imagined my journey to motherhood would take so long, and I never imagined that motherhood would mean so many hospital appointments, so much extra care and so much wiggles! However I see God’s hand every single step along the way, and I also see how much closer and transformative it has been to live a life of obedience, trust and faith.

For all of us there are aspects of our life that look so different to what we have planned, in fact for all of us at the moment so much of our life looks unrecognizable to what we have had planned, However, there is one thing we can be certatin of if we surrender to God and his plans for our life, and if we live our life filled with the Holy spirit, it will always be an adventure!