taught, but not learned.

And so the other thing I've learned -excuse me, been taught over and over again, is that you can't anticipate what God's doing. Some have said they can. That's great for you. I can't.

See, I'm a person very into details. I'm sure I could be an excellent conspiracy theorist if I wanted to. I make things out of nothing all the time. Like every other girl in my teenage years, I added up every single possible thing a guy might do or say around me, concluding whether or not he liked me. This was a very emotional time for me, because as you can imagine, as I watched him very closely and became finally convinced that he was really into me, I'd see him share his fries with my best friend. That's when I went home and had a meltdown about how I should have seen that he was in love with my friend instead. Sigh. Believe it or not, this is the ridiculousness that goes on in the head of a teenage girl. There it is.

I have this tendency to think about a given situation, look at the timing, look at the people involved, think about the past, and basically everything else I can to see that this, whatever it is, is meant to be. It is... the very will of God, and all the details I have put together leave no room for doubt. A line from a movie (that I don't necessarily recommend) really got me recently as I'm sure it didn't necessarily get to anyone else. It's the story of a girl whose fiancee dies, and she ends up finding all these crazy things out about him. Like, for instance, he has a son she never knew about (what?). The mother of the fiancee (a rich snob refusing to have anything tarnish her reputation) refuses to believe that her son could have had a son that no one knew about. The girl goes on to tell her fiancee's mother that she has seen him, and it looks exactly like him. The mother turns and replies, "I'm sure you could set ten toddlers in front of me, and I could find ways that they all looked exactly like him." It hit me. I do that. What I end up finding many times, weeks to months later is that what I thought to be a sign... oh, it wasn't.

Let me interject here also, that I am an obsessive list maker. I have to have a plan. That only adds.

I was telling a friend of mine (I'll give you a hint, he's one of the four followers I have) a few weeks ago everything that has happened since we moved to Missouri. I told him how we were certain we were supposed to be here, and that absolutely nothing has gone according to plan. In fact, not only did it not go to plan, but that we had been tossed into all sorts of hurricanes. He told me something that I had never thought of before, and I can't remember how I responded, but it has really changed my way of thinking about the last 3-4 years of my life. He told me basically that sometimes the paths we take, we are meant to take, but that God uses them as vehicles to something else. It kind of blew my mind wide open. It's one of those things you nod at and agree, but really the more I thought about it, I felt a little more free.

So call it what you will. Either we've made tons of mistakes and God still is patient and loving enough to take us where we're supposed to be (having learned much), or we are absolutely supposed to have gone everywhere we have because even though it didn't work out the way we thought it would, it was just a "vehicle" to where we were supposed to really go, and we wouldn't have really gotten there any other way. Either way, both ways reinforce the same things. God is a wonderful, loving, all-knowing God.