You can plan a lot of your future. 

Especially to make up for the childhood you couldn't plan. The best intentions, the most thought put into your hopes. The detailed plans you have though will never be yours to entirely control.  Plans are just that... desired actions we intend to carry out but truly, truly have no control over their outcome or the eventuality of them all coming into fruition. 

For as long as you live - your future and the decisions in it will be affected by you, anyone who is in your life .. and sometimes by those who are not. So many of us think we know the way things will go - we think naively that life will go according to all of our expectations and that people will be who we had hoped them to be. Even greater, that WE will be who we had hoped to be. 

Thankful for a God who plans our days - even when our plans fail. Jer. 29:11

"For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

Because free will of our own and others will affect even the greatest laid plans. People will make choices {and you too} that will elate you. Devastate you. And sometimes even erase you. The most incredibly freeing decision you can make - is to let go of it all and take each day is it comes. Acknowledging it as a gift. Every new road not planned is a new opportunity for a new journey. Love your plans, but learn to let go of them at a moment's notice. Be ready for a new route and an opportunity to learn. This is hard for those of us who are such planners, yet the only thing we can plan on is the unplanned. And if we can learn to embrace that - freedom. <3

I planned to be a graphic designer for life. 
I planned to grow old with people that I won't. 
I like every person I know.. have made plans that didn't work out.

And while things didn't go according to my plans and my journey hasn't been what I wrote out in the beginning ... God takes all of the decisions and plans and broken bits of living and creates roads we had never imagined being on in the first place. Getting lost in a dream that didn't come true and waking up in one we hadn't even imagined - sometimes is the life healing balm we never anticipated - but is God given. He makes beautiful things ...out of the plans we thought we had ... out of the plans He knows He has for us. I am enamored with the depth of this verse.

He knows the plans He has for me. 

Like that... I am in love with the greatest profession I will ever have. Never had anticipated having.. I never planned to be a photographer.. but it fills my heart in ways nothing else would. I photograph life and love. And I am meant to. PURPOSE.

And that.. I may have lost my little sister. We will not grow old together. Definitely not planned and entirely life-changing. And I will always argue with God it was too soon, until I see Him and He can explain why - until then I will have faith {as it is tattooed on my wrist to remind me every day} to trust Him and know that the entire experience of losing her made me take pain and turn it into fuel. A process I never knew before. It also gave me the greatest appreciation for life and living I have ever had. GRATITUDE. 

And like love - good luck planning that one. ;) It teaches you so much, good and bad. Had I met my true love when I was younger, I would have not known it or been ready for it. Early on life exchanged different plans for the ones I had, but life still had to take me through a series of events before I would even be ready for such a love as the man who tenderly holds my heart today. I would not have the blessing of my two incredible children. I would not have known the fragility of love and the blessing of believing in it again even when my plans utterly and heartbreakingly failed. TRUST.

Plans gone wrong could seem like losses. Loss is multi-faceted, but it reveals meaning. And not every un-met plan is a loss. Sometimes it is a blessing. My greatest unmet plans taught me purpose, gratitude and trust. God help me to know that while I diligently plan my days, You stand behind me knowing the outcome of every single one of them. Help me to embrace today and every unplanned day ahead as just that. heart emoticon

Be that lone bird on a wire that sees what plans he can make looking down and all around - but chooses to fly free of them.

Life is best unplanned.