Change of Plans

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

I’m a planner by nature.  Never been much of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of girl.  Plans on Friday night?  Determined by Tuesday.  Growing up, I had my entire life planned out.  Obviously not down to specifics, but by the time I hit the end of my second year of undergrad I knew where I was headed.  I packed everything I owned into my car and moved my life out to California - partially to escape a past, partially to work on that plan (you know the one - marriage, babies, a white picket fence, the “true American dream”).  Within a year of settling here I had met the man of my dreams.  Even though he and I had our own share of ups and downs and moments when real life began to interfere, I was set on what the rest of my life was going to look like.

6 years ago today, the universe decided to change my plans.  No warnings, no “hey Jen, get ready for the chaos that’s about to ensue,” no nothing.  Just a change of plans in the form of a car accident.  It was as if the universe had taken every mental blueprint I made about my life, threw them up in the air, and the wind took hold and blew them all away.  Who was I without my plan?

Perhaps you've been confronted with your own life-altering moments - moments where you're completely lost and have no idea how you'll survive.  Perhaps you're in the middle of one right now.  Someone just recently asked me how I got through that moment in my life.  The truth is, I honestly have no idea.  I do know that I had amazing people surrounding me, people encouraging me to take one step forward.  Within 24 hours my mom had landed in California with a 1-way ticket in her hand, who put up with my craziness and even dealt with the moment that I threw my cell phone across my living room.  And that night I had class, the first night of a new session that I couldn’t miss for fear of being dropped, where I met the professor who became my unofficial hero - who will never truly know just how much he actually saved my life.

Without lectures, he taught me that I had a choice.  I had a choice to stay in class that night.  I had a choice to let my grief envelope me, which is honestly what I really wanted to do.  I had the choice to focus on the plans I had lost, instead of what I had gained. I had the choice to put one foot in front of the other and take the baby steps I needed to squash the chaos around me.  I had the choice to turn my loss into something positive - a way to honor this man I loved while working through the pain.  I had the choice to pick myself up, dust off my clothing, fix the rips in my knees and start to move forward instead of being stuck in the grief.  Don’t get me wrong - I would trade everything to never have been forced to make those choices in my life.  But I couldn’t change it.

Life is really just a series of choices.  We all get to the point where we’re knocked over, where the universe decides it’s time for a change of plans, where we can’t stop it.  We can choose to adapt to those changes or get lost inside them.  Our choices are what define us, give us strength, wipe us out, or offer hope.  We may not always make the right choice.  No one is perfect, and thus there will always be decisions that aren’t technically the best.  But we make them.  And then we make others.  The point is, all we can ever ask for is to choose the best option in any given situation - choosing to be the best version of ourselves and in the process, choosing to put one foot in front of the other.

May your choices today build you up and offer you hope, happiness, peace and love.