This weekend we had a fabulous speaker, Steve McMillan, come to our church for a marriage seminar, and then he spoke again on Sunday morning. Sunday morning's message left us all in tears after he spoke words that personally touched every person in the sanctuary in one way or another. I was left in a puddle of tears as the words pounded into my heart. The main point of his message on Sunday was that we all have or had a perfect image of what our lives should look like, in particular, what our perfect family would look like. He took a hammer and smashed the glass of a frame containing the "perfect family" (similar to the one above) and told us they don't exist.
Whether it be parents with grown children who have strayed or have their own version of family drama, or busy young moms who struggle to keep a clean diaper on their baby while the toddler flushes a toy down the toilet, or the couple with empty arms and an empty womb who long for children of their own-whose framed family picture is missing a few little people in it that they thought they would have by then...all of us have expectations, and in one way or another, all of these expectations are either crushed or are forced to change.
Steve said something that I need to remember daily, and some days, momentarily. God wants us to give him these broken expectations-these broken pieces- and ask Him to write a new story. Not the story we thought we would have...but the story He has planned for us all along. Looking forward to see what He's writing for us.
