This Wasn’t On The Five-Year Plan
Sometimes I’m tempted to look around at the chaos that is now my life and wonder how on earth I got here.
How did I go from full-time ministry as a pastor’s wife to living with my parents while building a tiny house in middle age?
If you had asked me ten years ago what this stage of life would look like, I doubt any of these things would have made the list:
Writing books.
Helping run a painting business.
Navigating health challenges.
Having both a child in college and two in elementary school when most people my age are becoming empty nesters and I’m still browsing book fair flyers.
Trying to figure out what comes next when the path I spent years walking suddenly disappeared beneath my feet.
If I’m not careful, it’s easy to look at all the twists and turns and see nothing more than a collection of random events and unfortunate circumstances loosely held together by the grace of God, sheer stubbornness, and perhaps a slightly unhealthy dependence on humor.
A series of detours.
A life that somehow wandered off course.
But then I look closer.
And I start noticing a thread.
When I was a little girl, I didn’t dream of becoming a doctor or a lawyer.
I had no plans to be a pastor’s wife.
In fact, as a child, my plans were far less polished.
I was convinced I was going to be a stand-up comedian.
That’s right, my childhood dream was to make people laugh.
I can still remember sitting in my grandparents’ living room watching Hee Haw and the Mandrell Sisters, completely convinced that one day I might be up there too.
Thankfully for everyone involved, that never happened.
At least not exactly.
A few years later, another dream took shape.
I wanted to be a writer. This one followed me a little farther. I started studying creative writing after high school, fully expecting life to head in that direction.
At the time, they seemed like entirely different things.
One involved a stage.
The other involved a notebook.
One was loud.
The other was quiet.
Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of both dreams.
Life moved on. Instead, I got married, stepped into ministry and found myself on a road I never would have predicted.
There were children to raise, ministries to serve, responsibilities to carry, and more immediate things demanding my attention.
Like approximately seventeen thousand loads of laundry to fold.
Eventually, I assumed those dreams belonged to a former version of me.
Looking back now, I realize neither one ever really left.
I just stopped recognizing them.
Because while I wasn’t pursuing comedy, I was still making people laugh.
Sometimes from a church platform.
Sometimes around a dinner table.
Sometimes through a social media post.
And occasionally through the use of sarcasm as a slightly unhealthy coping mechanism. My sense of humor has carried me through a lot of difficult seasons.
If I’m honest, there were times I laughed at something before I allowed myself to feel it. Sometimes because life was genuinely funny. Sometimes because the alternatives felt considerably less appealing.
And while I wasn’t calling myself a writer, I was still writing.
Creating resources.
Newsletters.
Bulletins.
The occasional strongly-worded email that I would never actually send.
Teaching.
Telling stories.
Trying to find words for things that felt difficult to explain.
The older I get, the more I realize the dreams themselves were never the point.
The point was what sat underneath them.
Connecting with people.
Telling stories.
Finding light in heavy places.
Helping people laugh, yes—but also helping them feel seen.
Somewhere along the way, those things found their way into nearly every part of my life.
Into ministry.
Into motherhood.
Into friendships.
Into writing.
Into conversations around dinner tables and hospital waiting rooms.
I thought I was headed for a stage.
Instead, I became a pastor’s wife.
Which, if you’ve spent enough time around church people, is really just a different kind of material.
Looking back, I’m beginning to suspect God was preparing me for this life all along.
Though I remain unconvinced that quite this many character-building opportunities were strictly necessary.
These days, I spend a fair amount of time wondering how exactly God intends to use my particular combination of gifts, life experiences, and slightly warped sense of humor in a season that looks nothing like the one I envisioned.
I’m still figuring that part out.
But I’m beginning to suspect having all the answers isn’t the point.
The older I get, the more I wonder if that’s true of more things than just childhood dreams.
Sometimes I look back at the different seasons of my life and they seem like separate stories.
The church years.
The parenting years.
The years that felt stable.
The years that didn’t.
The plans that worked.
The plans that unraveled.
At first glance, they can look disconnected.
But lately I’ve begun to wonder if they aren’t separate stories at all.
Maybe they’ve been connected by a thread all along.
Because when I look back, I don’t just see a little girl who wanted to be a comedian.
Or a teenager who wanted to write.
I see the same gifts, the same interests, the same burdens, and the same ways God wired me showing up again and again in different seasons.
Because even here, I keep finding the thread.
In blog posts written from my parent’s kitchen table.
In a memoir I never planned to write.
In conversations with people navigating their own unexpected seasons.
In making my family laugh when life feels heavy.
In telling stories about grace found in places I never wanted to be.
The setting changed.
The responsibilities changed.
The titles changed.
But the thread remained.
Maybe that’s why God is often less concerned with the path than we are.
We worry about whether we’ve ended up in the wrong place.
Whether we’ve missed our calling.
Whether life took a detour it wasn’t supposed to take.
Meanwhile, He keeps faithfully weaving the thread.
The gifts.
The passions.
The burdens.
The ways He uniquely wired us.
They keep showing up, sometimes in places we never expected.
So if you find yourself looking around at your life wondering how you got here, take a closer look.
You may discover that not everything changed.
You may discover that the deepest parts of who you are are still there, woven through every chapter.
Maybe the road changed.
Maybe the plans changed.
Maybe the titles changed.
But don’t be too quick to assume you’ve lost yourself.
The thread is still there.
You just have to look closely enough to see it
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