Plans for Me

I'm linking this to Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop. This week's prompt: A song with significance.

Three years of trying and two failed intrauterine inseminations had left us empty and cold. We knew God had placed in our hearts a desire to be parents but the plans we thought we had prayerfully laid were not bringing the success we thought we were promised.

We still trusted His ways were higher than ours. We just didn’t know what He was doing exactly and we were confused. We sought His council and decided to stop any further treatment and begin seeking the next path He had for us.

We were grieving and praying and talking and grieving and praying and talking. We were devastated over the children we would never have and, while the thought of adoption is sweet, the reality of it is daunting.  We needed to mourn the natural plans that young couples make before we could embrace God’s plans however better and more wonderful than we could imagine.

Together and separately we were beseeching God to speak, to lead, to guide. But we both felt empty and forgotten. Just as we were despairing the Lord was beginning to work His ways to turn our hearts, to answer our prayers, to direct our paths down a journey that would take us from two to four in less than two years. But we…we didn’t know that yet and we felt lost in the middle of a dark ocean.

 My introspective husband, who grieves so privately and holds me so strongly while I grieve out loud surprised me one day with a very open and tangible expression of his pain. He was preaching on the minor prophets, and this particular week his Bible reading time had landed him in Habakkuk. Specifically Habakkuk 3:17-19.

The passage speaks of a dry and barren time when trees bear no fruit and crops fail. A moment in time when the pens are empty of animals, where no life seems to bloom. An empty, forsaken, dark time. A time like the one we were experiencing. Yet, Habakkuk states, I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. Habakkuk talks of a God who is sovereign, who is strong, who makes his people climb heights like deer.

And my gentle husband, who had learned to play the guitar not many months before that, who is not someone to write much, who is not someone to express his heart-felt emotions very easily, this man picked up his guitar and, confronted with the same God of whom Habakkuk spoke so many years ago, wrote a song of praise and trust.

“When all my plans

Seem to fade into the darkness

My hopes and dreams

Washed away by stormy seas.

I can’t see His face

I can’t hear His voice

I feel like giving in

Waiting for his promised peace.

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord

I’ll sing a song of my salvation

And I know that He will be my strength

He will come and give me peace

‘Cause He still got plans for me.

He’ll help me dance again

He’ll help me climb this mountain

I’ll run just like the deer

‘Cause I know He’s still right here.”

I wish you could hear the melody. The whole of it is moving and it breaks my heart each time I hear it. But He did. He brought the peace He promised. He gave us back our joy, He helped us dance again, He had plans still…

It has been more than five years since that song was written and we have seen the plans that God had for us come to fruition. It was not even a year later that we held Isabel in our arms and just a few months after that we had Noah. But we didn’t know that then. Matt didn’t know that. But he knew that he, like Habakkuk before him, could sing of joy and hope in this God that takes the arid, dry, desolate times of our lives and puts a new song in our mouths, a hymn of praise to our God.