A borrowed blog...

I know an amazing girl named Jackie.  Jackie and I go back to 2009.  While our friendship seemed passing at the beginning, I've recently, this year, have grown close to her in a way that is virtually indescribable.  She is a fantastic person.  I know that God put her into my life for a specific reason, possibly a specific season.  I won't go into all of the details, but I was reading her blog entry from right before I went to Africa.  I love the ability that God has given her in regards to writing and expressing words in a way that I cannot.

Here is what she has to say...

THERE WAS A TIME. THEN IT ALL WENT WRONG.

“I just knew he was giving me lip service, Jackie,” one of my friends said over the phone last night, “I just didn’t want to believe it.” 

Why is it that when Fantine sings “I Dreamed a Dream” in Les Misérables it forms a lump in the throat? Perhaps the sting of being wrong about something we believed in enough to hope for is a hard thing to swallow. We struggle with disappointment when what we fight for still is just beyond our grasp. 

I find it dumbfounding how the same people keep coming into my life with different faces and names. Because it wasn’t just my friend cocking her head to the side with her “Really?” face on. Especially when games are still being played well after school is over. But, what can you do? I’ve been around the block. I’ve been around this block. 

After getting off the phone I watched Kathryn Schulz’s TED talks On Being Wrong and Don’t Regret Regret. Clearly I need an education on why history keeps pulling one over on me. But as soon as I stopped letting the steam cloud my vision, I heard something major. There’s a fact of life that is painfully true: sometimes we’re wrong. Our timing was slightly off. We retreated when we should have ran toward. We give the benefit of the doubt too hastily. We believe that this situation will turn out differently even if all signs point to a result that is just as bad—or worse. And it’s a stunner because at one point we had no doubt that we were right. 

Yet I find myself relating more to who God is. Not that God is ever wrong, but it’s in what seems to be a fool’s hope that what is broken inside of me can be made whole. And though I often try to pull the wool over His eyes, I’m sure God probably makes the same “Really?” face that I do. So when I sat down this morning thinking I finished writing this blog after that last sentence, my hurt melted into a smirk. When I opened My Utmost for His Highest the verse staring me in the face was John 2:24-25 and a sentence in the paragraph below it read this, “If I put my trust in human beings first, I will end in despairing of everyone; I will become bitter, because I have insisted on man being what no man ever can be—absolutely right.”

Yes, God. You ain’t no fool. I know that what you make right won’t pass me by.

I chose to share this specific entry with you because I was the "friend" that she mentioned in her post.  There was a time and then it all went wrong.  It is painful when we realize that we were wrong about something we wanted and hoped so much to be right about.  In a way it is comforting to know that we can never be "absolutely right".  It makes us fully dependent on God.  Not only God, but His plan, and His plan according to His timing.  Jackie, I couldn't have said it better myself, "Yes God, You ain't no fool.  I know that what You make right won't pass me by."  Amen to that! It's comforting to know that we have a God that is in control, a God that knows what He is doing, and a God that has our best interest at heart.