It’s Not Supposed To Be This Way: A 5-Day Challenge By Lysa TerKeurstSample

The Story We Tell Ourselves

There is a favorite story I like to tell myself. It’s the one about how my life should turn out.

Though it’s riddled with missing everyday details, it’s full of a general sense of okayness. No, actually more than okayness. It’s the story where my toes can dig deeply into the sands of a glorious land called normal. A land I didn’t design but one where I’m allowed to nod in agreement before any changes occur. And I can veto all circumstances that don’t look right, feel right, or smell right. 

People are kind. They do what they say they are going to do and are only grumpy enough to keep things interesting. Goodness dots the landscape like trees in bloom. Peace hovers like the best poofy clouds. And the soundtrack is simple and sweet, crescendoing with lingering laughter.

I suspect you have a version of this kind of story you like to tell yourself as well. We don’t just want to read the end of our story and feel good about it. We want to take the pen and write it ourselves. We feel very certain how things should turn out. But we live in the uncertainty of neither being able to predict nor control the outcome.

Humans are very attached to outcomes. We say we trust God but behind the scenes we work our fingers to the bone and our emotions into a tangled fray trying to control our outcomes. We praise God when our normal looks like what we thought it would. We question God when it doesn’t. And walk away from Him when we have a sinking suspicion that God is the one who set fire to the hope that was holding us together. Even the most grounded people can feel hijacked by the winds of unpredictable change.

Yes, I make such big assumptions of what a good God should do and then find myself epically disappointed when the winds change and nothing at all feels right. Over the last few years, I’ve faced heartbreak after heartbreak in my marriage, health, and family. This isn’t how I pictured my life right now. And, though the details of your story may be different, this probably isn’t how you thought things would look in your life right now either.

But, here’s the hope. Though we can’t predict or control or demand the outcome of our circumstances, we can know with great certainty we will be okay. Better than okay. Better than normal. We will be victorious because Jesus is victorious (1 Corinthians 15:57). And victorious people were never meant to settle for normal.

But what if the victory is only in part how things turn out? What if a bigger part of being victorious is how well we live today? This hour. This minute. 

Over the next few days, we’ll start to find a way to tie our hope not to the specific outcomes we thought were the only way back to normal, but rather to the very heart of God. The Author of the story your heart could never conceive but begs to live with every thumping beat. There is more to all of this than you know. And I can’t wait to watch it unfold in your life and mine.

RESPOND: How would you describe your version of ‘normal’? Write down a few words that come to mind. How is your view of God impacted when reality doesn’t align with the way you’d like things to be?