Not on Plan A

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I just finished a book called “Plan B-What do you do when God doesn’t show up the way he thought he would.” I’ll post a review on it soon, but it has really made me think about my “Plan B” life.
The life I walk through day to day is not the life I dreamed of as a child. No first grader is going to stand up and say, “When I grow up, I’m gonna go to college, get a degree, move back home and be a substitute teacher.” Students love to ask,

“Why are you a sub?”
“Is this what you always wanted to do?”

I want to look at them and say, “No, fools! It’s just a job. Sometimes when you grow up life isn’t as simple as “I’m gonna grow up to be a firefighter/ Dr. that way I save victims from the fire and I can treat them before they get to the hospital.” Now we know that life doesn’t work that way. Even though it’s a nice idea, unless you have blue blood no one who spent the money it takes to go to medical school, could afford to then take a job as a firefighter.

To me substitute taching is a Plan B, but others are in similar situations with differant jobs. No one grows up thinking “When I grow up, I want to file papers all day.” Or “I want to still be struggling though my undergrad degree at 30.” Or “I would just love spending my days asking people for finacial support.”

I have sat back and wondered countless times how did I get here? How has this become my life? I review every decision I have ever made to see if I should have chosen differantly. I think back to how I didn’t like my white picket fence, christian college. I wonder, if I had had a better attitude, maybe I could have made it work for me. Maybe I could have gotten a job there and gone to grad school like my brother did, he has his own house now. Or maybe if I had accepted the promotion at the retail store, I could be a manager now. Or maybe if I had processed better the year I traveled the world, I wouldn’t have crumbled and had to spend my first year back in counseling. But even as I think these things, I know my college just wasn’t a good fit, and I wouldn’t have been happy there. I hated my job in retail because I hated asking people to spend more than they proboally should, so I never found any satisfaction because I had a constant value struggle that I couldn’t disconnect. I feel like I process all I could when I was traveling, and really I have learned a whole lot more in my years of reflecting than I did when I was actually traveling.

Life is what it is. I am where I am. I can’t change the past.

So here I am, knowing that I rejected paths because I knew they weren’t what I wanted. Yet, somehow I’m still on Plan B.
I feel like my only option now, is to ask God to turn my Plan B into his Plan A.