Photo by Elina Volkova
When I was younger, I had a picture in my head of what a good life would look like. I assumed I would get married. I had dreams about what I would accomplish and expectations about what God would do with my life. I loved Jesus deeply, but if I’m honest, mixed into my faith was an assumption I didn’t even know I had: if I followed Jesus faithfully, surely He would eventually lead me toward the life I imagined.
He didn’t.
Some of the things I prayed for never happened. There were doors I desperately wanted God to open that stayed closed, and other doors I never could have imagined walking through that changed my life completely.
Now, decades later, I can see something I couldn’t see then: following Jesus was never about getting Him to help me build the life I wanted. It was about giving Him my life.
I wonder if that distinction is harder to understand today than ever before.
We are surrounded by pictures of what a good life is supposed to look like. You don’t have to wonder what everyone else is doing because you can watch from your phone. You can see who is getting married, traveling the world, building their career, having babies, finding their calling, and apparently having a fabulous time doing all of it.
Without realizing it, we begin to measure. Am I behind? Am I doing enough? Should I be further along by now? Why does everyone else seem happier than I am?
Comparison isn’t new, but we have never had this much access to other people’s lives. And the finish line keeps moving. There will always be someone prettier, more successful, more in love, or more certain about where their life is going.
I don’t think Jesus ever intended us to live this exhausted.
When He approached His first disciples, He didn’t offer them a blueprint for the perfect life or promise that everything would eventually fall into place. His invitation was much simpler: “Follow me.”
I’m increasingly convinced that cultivating a lifelong faith begins right there. At some point, we have to stop asking Jesus to help us create the life we have imagined and become willing to follow Him into the life He actually gives us.
That is easy to say until the life He gives us looks different from the one we wanted—when the relationship doesn’t happen, the prayer remains unanswered, someone we love gets sick, or the future takes a turn we never saw coming. Those moments expose what we really believe about Jesus. Is He valuable because He can give us the life we want, or is He Himself the treasure?
I have lived long enough now to know that life rarely follows the script we write for it. Some of the greatest gifts in my life came wrapped in circumstances I never would have chosen. There are things I still wish had turned out differently and prayers I would still love God to answer. Following Jesus has not made me immune to disappointment, and surrender has not made me stop wanting things. It has simply taught me that I can want something deeply without needing it to make my life whole.
And here is the part I never could have known when I was younger: my life has been a beautiful surprise.
The life I actually got has been so much bigger than the one I knew to ask for. I never could have imagined that following Jesus would take me into refugee communities in Lebanon, the country where I grew up, or into the lives of vulnerable young women in Uganda. I couldn’t have predicted the people I would meet, the places I would go, or the ways God would allow me to use my life. So much of what has become most meaningful to me was never part of my plan.
I think that is what we miss when we become too attached to our picture of the perfect life. We assume surrender means settling for less, when sometimes surrender makes room for a life we weren’t imaginative enough to dream up ourselves. That doesn’t mean everything works out beautifully. It means we learn to trust that God’s purposes are bigger than our ability to see them from where we are standing.
If I could sit across from my younger self today, I wouldn’t tell her to dream less. I wouldn’t tell her not to want marriage or success or adventure or meaningful work. I would tell her to dream, but to leave plenty of room for surprise. I would tell her not to spend so much time trying to make her life turn out right that she misses what Jesus is doing right in front of her.
I would also tell her that trusting God is going to mean more than she understands right now. It is relatively easy to believe in the goodness of God when His goodness looks like the thing you were hoping for. The deeper work of faith happens when the answer is no, the waiting lasts longer than expected, or the life unfolding in front of you bears little resemblance to the one you thought He would give you.
That is where a lifelong faith is formed—not by giving up our desires or pretending disappointment doesn’t hurt, but by learning that God’s goodness is not measured by whether we get the outcome we wanted. Sometimes we will understand what He is doing, and sometimes we won’t.
So perhaps the question worth asking isn’t simply What do I want my life to look like? but What will I believe about God when my life doesn’t look that way?
Because eventually every faith has to answer that question.
And perhaps cultivating a faith that lasts is learning, again and again, that the goodness of God can be trusted even when the outcome cannot be predicted.
