Navigating Life’s Unexpected Detours

Have you ever had dreams and plans for life, started down the path to achieving them, and after a while you looked around and wondered, “How did I get here”?

Key Points

• Often the master plan that we have for our lives doesn’t work out. We can be frozen in a place of confusion, questioning everything…
• Life is not linear. We don’t go from A to B in a nice straight line. Life is often a topsy-turvy maze; the key is that we never stop taking steps.
• The situations that we encounter along the way that seem at the time to be the most painful detours – can be the situations that produce the most growth in us, that ultimately lead to our best futures.

Where you are standing doesn’t seem to relate to the dreams and plans you started out trying to achieve.

Sometimes, that can be exciting; we can be further along than expected. Other times, it can be incredibly frustrating, with a side order of unmet expectations and unfulfilled dreams.

Detours lead to questions

I got married for the first time at 19.

My dreams for that marriage were pretty standard (I think); grow old together, have lots of children, buy a house, sell it after a few years, travel for a while and then have some grandkids running around. Things did not go the way I expected.

I have a beautiful daughter from that marriage, but when it ended, I was left with a lot of questions. There were so many questions about myself, God, and my future as a single mum. I wondered how on earth this had happened. My reality was so far from my plan.

I have been married to my second husband for close to sixteen years now.

Again, I had many dreams and plans for this marriage, and they also involved many children, houses, and travel. My husband has a son, we blended our family, but we weren’t able to have any more children.

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We don’t own a house anymore, and we haven’t done a lot of travel. The dream to have more children in particular was an incredibly hard one to let go of, I grieved it for a long time.

Once again, my master plan looked nothing like the reality I was standing in.

Life is not linear

I like to come into situations with my steps from A to B pretty much mapped out.

I have learned that life is not linear. We don’t go from A to B in a nice straight line. We take steps ahead; we go back a few steps.

There might need to be a sidestep and then another step up. Somewhere there could be a stop on a platform for a while. Sometimes we go around in a circle and end up where we started.

We need to continually check though, that we are still taking steps. It’s easy to become frozen when life is not the way you dreamed.

Unfulfilled dreams can be pivotal moments

If life were linear, I wonder if we would have the character development we need to live in community with other people.

The situations that we encounter along the way that seem at the time to be the most painful detours can be the situations that produce the most growth in us.

Those side steps that seem like heartbreak and unfulfilled dreams can be the steps that lead to pivotal moments in our futures.

There is a passage in the Bible in John 15:4-5, where it talks about how we are like the branches of a grapevine and Jesus is like the vine. It says that we are to remain in him. Without the vine (Jesus) we can’t produce fruit. Life is not linear, but if we are not managing all the challenges in partnership with Jesus, they become so much harder.

We can continue to walk through the difficult situations that we face because we know that we don’t do it alone. He will produce good things out of the painful detours in our lives when we walk it with him.

Article supplied with thanks to Lorrene McClymont. Lorrene McClymont is a writer and photographer from Hope Images. On her blog ‘Moments to Rest’, she shares about rest, faith, and family.

Feature image: Supplied (Photo by Sven Piek on Unsplash)