Accepting life, and all that it throws at me, and all the different turns it takes me around is hard. I think that this is something that everyone naturally struggles with, since no one really enjoys falling, but I also feel like it’s one thing that is particularly hard for me. I’ve been fairly successful in school, and in many other endeavors in my life, but I almost wish that this wasn’t the case, so I would be better at accepting the times of struggle, and better at opening my heart to receive guidance.
This past fall, I had to learn the lesson to truly trust in my Heavenly Father, and in what He sees for my life, since He has everything figured out so much better than I could ever imagine.
This past fall, I had something in mind that I wanted to badly. It seemed like the perfect direction for me to go in, and I told myself over and over that it was right, and that everything was going to play out perfectly, and that it all made sense.
I had prayed about it, and over-thought every aspect of it about a million times. But what I was missing was keeping my heart open and accepting of whatever God’s path for me was. Through those months of prayer, searching for the right path, searching so hard for a confirmation that the direction I was wanting to take was the right one, my heart wasn’t truly open. When I used the logical part of my brain, the path I was wanting to take made sense in every way. In reality, though, I was tricking myself and not admitting that I wasn’t as accepting of God’s will as I continued to tell myself I was.
As I prayed all those prayers, I told myself that I would be fine the answer I received. I told myself over and over, trying to convince myself, I think, that my heart was open, and the right answer would come, and be crystal-clear. The thing is, I think I received my answer from God early on, at the very beginning of the whole soul-searching process, but since it wasn’t the one I thought I wanted, I made myself ignore it and continue searching for what must be the real right answer.
Eventually I became so confident that it would all work out, that my dreams would be realized, that my brain had it all figured out right. But then it didn’t. It didn’t work out. The opportunity I wanted to badly to take hold of, that I had worked so hard to qualify for crashed down in front of my face.
But when I failed, when that door I so badly wanted to step through closed in front of me, I actually felt deeply at peace. Deep down, the entire time I had been searching for God’s approval for the path I wanted to turn down, approval that my brain was telling me to do the right thing, I knew that He had actually already told me at the beginning that it wasn’t right. I had just continued to choose to ignore that, and move forward, and convince myself that I hadn’t received my answer yet. It was a hard thing to finally come to terms with myself and admit that it took the physical, definitive answer to convince myself that my proposed direction was wrong for me. Where had all of my trust, and my faith gone, if I was at the point where I was ignoring the truth that had been placed right at my feet? All of this caused me to step back and re-evaluate my level of reliance on my Father in Heaven, and my capacity to accept true promptings and move forward.
That day that I received my ‘no,’ I was humbled. I learned the hard, but beautiful lesson that there is something spectacular and grand going on somewhere beyond this world. Through that peace and comfort I felt that day, I received a witness that although disappointment and a dashing of hopes is hard, the magnificent way that everything will work out in the end will be so much better than any future I could possibly imagine.
This experience taught me to put my whole trust in my Heavenly Father’s plan. I learned that if I want to save myself a lot of heartache in the deciding-and-seeking-for-confirmation process, the very best thing to do is to keep my heart completely open for answers, the entire time, and to give myself over to His will from the very beginning. I’ve learned that life works so much better, and peace comes so much more consistently when I remember to trust, and to accept, even (or especially) when my original thoughts don’t match up with the larger picture.
I learned that trust – complete and infinite and whole – always, always works.
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Simply Surrender!