I Just Didn’t Know

The surprising beauty of an unanswered prayer.

I remember sitting in a ministry training when I was 22 being led by a single woman in her mid-thirties and thinking, “I love the way she is giving her life away, but Lord, I don’t want to end up like her.” 

At the time, the idea of being in my thirties, unmarried, childless, and only having ministry to show for myself, felt like a dreaded fate. The flaws in that thinking are too great to count, but chief among them is the idea that living out the great commission in any form would be an insignificant or insufficient way to spend a life. 

Fast forward ten years, I recently saw that same woman doing the same meaningful ministry that she has been doing for decades – holding out what is Good, True, and Beautiful to kids in desperate need of the Gospel. Regardless of how similar her circumstance may seem, I’m confident that the Lord has been working for her good and his glory over the last decade in more ways than I could ever know.

Seeing her, I got a flashback of that moment in that training and the thought I had ten years prior, quickly followed by a realization that I’m probably the age she was when I had that thought.

A series of thoughts flood my mind – 

Well this is funny. My life is exactly what I didn’t want. 

Lord, did you hear my prayer? 

Okay, but really, I love what she is doing, but I want a different story. 

All these ideas swirl and compete for my attention, until they are quieted by one culminating thought – 

I didn’t know how good this life could be. 

I didn’t know. I didn’t know then, what I have learned now. Christ could be enough. Christ is enough. I didn’t know that being single and in my thirties and leveraging my time and energy for the glory of God and the good of his church could be so beautiful. I didn’t know the local church could be the perfect place to use the gifts God has given me. I didn’t know the people of God could be the family I longed to be a part of. I didn’t know the work of mothering the body could satisfy the desire to mother a baby. I didn’t know what rich love and friendship was available in sistering and being sistered. I didn’t know that this life deemed “lacking” by my twenty-two-year-old self, could be so abundantly full. I just didn’t know.

I didn’t know this life could be so good. 

It’s not the life I would have chosen, but it is the life I’m living. The life and story that God, in his infinite wisdom and goodness, has laid out for me and I can affirm that it is exceedingly and abundantly more than I could have imagined. 

It turns out that the “good life” isn’t determined by our circumstances, but instead determined by the God who is good and offers life in Christ. There is a verse in a Cityalight song that says,

To this I hold, my hope is only Jesus

For my life is wholly bound to His

Oh how strange and divine, I can sing, “All is mine”

Yet not I, but through Christ in me

Maybe your life is everything you hoped it would be or nothing like you planned, either way I’m praying that today you might see the beauty in your own days. Not because of your marital status or job title or bank balance, but because Jesus has given us the ability to sing “all is mine” and if all is ours in Him, what is there to fear?