We don’t have to wait for the hard season to be over before we start living well.

There was a plan, I had a plan. My thirtieth birthday was just a few years away and in my plan, it was time to start a family. Most of our peers had already started families, we had waited but now I was ready.

But guess what? My plan wasn’t working.

The doctor told me I was underweight and likely under too much stress at work. So I headed to a yoga studio a few nights a week to help deal with stress. And then I walked into a women’s only gym and asked a personal trainer to help me gain weight in a healthy way.

But guess what? My solution wasn’t working.

For a while, I had felt this nudge inside of me. I had worked hard to build my career but it took the best of me. In my heart, I knew I couldn’t be the mom I wanted (I wasn’t even the wife I wanted to be now) and continue in this career. So after much back and forth I took the plunge and resigned. Not for another job, after all, I wanted a family.

But guess what? Leaving my job didn’t magically bring babies.

With the encouragement of my husband, I took the time to refocus and take a breath. During this time I attended a women’s bible study on 1 Samuel. In the very first chapter of Samuel, we meet Hannah who has been unable to bear children. In the temple, she is weeping and her husband Elkanah asks her “Hannah, why are you weeping? Why don’t you eat? Why are you downhearted? Do I not mean more to you than ten sons?”

Whoo…….. This question hit me so hard. Like a lightning bolt moment.
Here I was weeping over what was not and in the process failing to live well with what was.

It’s not like when you have an aha moment you just walk out changed and everything is better. There is a journey of learning how to travel this road in a different way. I still was grieving but I began to look at life through a different lens. We didn’t know if we would ever have children or what our path might look like. What if in my desire for something I didn’t have I missed the gift of what I already had right in front of me? How many single women longed for a husband? I had an amazing one. How many women longed for so much of what I already had and yet here I was not appreciating what I had, longing for what I didn’t have. I’m not saying my grief or my desire to be a mother wasn’t valid. It was….yet the amount of space I allowed it to consume in my life was leaving little room for other things.

What if in my desire for something I didn’t have, I missed the gift of what I already had right in front of me?

This journey lasted for a little while. It took us through a miscarriage and more grief, more learning. The book Believing God by Beth Moore made such an impact in that time. Learning to let go of my plans and trust that God’s heart for me was far greater than I even dared to imagine. I began my slow journey of releasing my tightly held grip on what I thought life should look like. A journey towards living the life I had well one day at a time.

How often do we find ourselves thinking “when we get through this season” life will be better?

How often do we find ourselves living for the future? Working tireless hours to save money so when we retire we can travel and enjoy life, only when we retire our body has a different plan and we can’t travel because of health.

Working tireless hours to provide for our family all the material things only to realize when they are grown and gone you don’t have the relationship you want to have with your family.

Spending countless hours longing for children, having children, and living in that role of mom all the while losing your connection with your husband.

What is enough? If we are always living for the next thing, working for the next thing. When do we reach enough?

Pandemic Life has brought out more moments of grief than I care to admit. It has left me with puffy eyes, a blotchy face, and a pile of used tissues. It has been easy in the circumstances to fall back into the trap of becoming so focused on what I see as a loss, what I wish was different.
Like most of life, even past lessons learned are easily forgotten.

We have no idea what tomorrow brings. We can make all the plans in the world but life may not cooperate with our plans. So how about rather than looking for this season to be over, to pass we ask ourselves.

How do I live well today? Today is what we have been given.

I don’t want to live my life so consumed grieving for what is not,
that I have missed out on what was right in front of me.

It’s Ok not to be OK. We just don’t want to live in that place for too long. Find joy in the moments, count your blessings, breathe.