All According to Plan (just not my plan) Part 3

We're knee-deep into a multi-faceted story of college, missions, plans, and (gulp) a relationship. If you've missed any previous posts, find them here and here.

Cute-guy-from-AWANA is now going to have a name. Joseph.

We started our relationship, and on our first date, we hiked to a famous, well –lit cross in the Coachella Valley.

Symbolic, yes? 

Verily. 

The cross where Jesus gave His life is the place grace was forged, and grace has been the hallmark of our relationship. I’ll come back to that.

We booked it up that mountain. Cute-guy-from---- I mean, Joseph, is quite fit, and I had an agenda of impressing him. Not an important detail so let’s move on.

*deep breath*

As the choir’s tour came to a close, I was forced to decide whether or not to go back to Uganda or stay in the U.S. That decision would decide whether or not we could spend time together before Joseph began BMT (Basic Military Training). 

I decided to go. 

February 21, I flew to Africa. Two weeks later, on March 5, my grandma passed away. Shut away in a little office room on the orphanage property in Uganda, I called Joseph and sobbed into his ear. It would be less than 24 hours before  Joseph would get on a bus to leave for BMT.  I flew home alone about two weeks later. I know I told that part really fast, but I’m also sure you can imagine how crazy that time was.

BMT meant practically no communication. And what communication we did have was sketchy at best:

• They didn’t allow them to mail letters (the airmen snuck letters to the post anyway)
•  Most of his letters got sent back to him, except one to my family (which barely mentioned me) and a pass to get on base for his graduation
• He got to make a three minute phone call and my dad took up a whole two minutes with small talk

So let’s just say it was rough.

It was during this time that I began to surrender to the Lord.  I was terrified to surrender Joseph because I wanted to keep him. But I was afraid that God’s plan didn’t include Joseph, which is ironic because it was actually my erroneous planning that lead me to that conclusion. But it was becoming apparent that if I didn’t surrender him to the Lord, I could never really fully have him. I would just be hogging this idea of what I wanted to myself. So one night I knelt beside my bed and surrendered our relationship to the Lord.

I’m going to fast forward to after his graduation, to summer of 2018. I was living in Joshua Tree at the time, house-sitting for about a month. Joseph was going through tech school in Texas. It was during this time that Joseph and I began to take a good look at our relationship. We really wanted to know what God’s plan was, but we weren’t quite sure. We knew we loved each other, though we had never really said it out loud, and we knew we wanted to be together, but what if it was not God’s plan for us to be together? We needed to be faithful to our future spouse, and while we wanted so badly for that to include each other, we didn’t know the plan. So we stepped back from our relationship and started to pray.

Now God is extremely good to me and has tons of grace over my life because I knew there weren't many ways I would really know if He wanted me to marry Joseph- and I had a very specific way in mind. I wasn’t going to limit God by saying it was the ONLY WAY, because God is so much bigger than that and can show me however He would like. But I did mention it to Him: “Lord, I would really know you want me to marry Joseph if You showed me like this.” I’m not going to go into detail but I will tell you that HE SHOWED UP AND SHOWED ME BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT.

Needless to say, we got back together. That fall, one of my other dreams came true- I started my first year of college.

After six months of long distance, Joseph was able to take some leave. Now our plan (lol) was based on the fact that he was stationed in Florida, would come home for a while, and then go back. God’s plan involved a hurricane, some disappointment, and a base change. 

Let me explain. 

Hurricane Michael swept through  Florida, where Joseph was finishing his training, and destroyed the base. With all of the moving, Joseph didn’t come home when we wanted him to. There was also uncertainty over which base he was going to end up at, because clearly he was not going back to Tyndall. One day while at school, he called me. 

“GUESS WHAT?” 

“What?” 

“I’m going to be stationed in Nevada.”

My brain tried very hard to be excited. I was grateful that he was going to be only four hours away from where I lived (God’s plan is much better clearly) 

BUT I hated Nevada. 

With a passion. 

It’s one of my top states that I would never have chosen to live in.

Guess where I live now (and FYI I absolutely love where I live)?

But we’re not there yet. One night in January we hiked up to the cross of our first date. We knelt under the cross and asked the Lord to reveal when we could get married. Little did I know that the Lord gave Joseph the date to propose soon after. The proposal deserves its own blog post, so I won’t go into detail. Let’s just say it happened under the stars, included a BEAUTIFUL ring, and involved God speaking  to us in a very clear and profound and rather funny way. But I digress.

Our plan (it’s funny every time I say that now) was to get married in September. We picked a date, but I did 

not. 

have. 

peace. So we went back to prayer. We decided not to get married on September 21^st. It turns out the day we set was during a temporary deployment. However, we didn’t know that for a while! We had been saved from planning a wedding on a date that wouldn’t have even been available.

We decided on a marriage date the morning Joseph drove me to the airport to fly to Bulgaria. Eight months later, we were married. Our marriage was also not according to [our] plan, but that, my friends, can be read about at a later date.

I hope the huge mass of information I just loaded your brain with doesn’t take away from the clear manifestation of God’s clear direction amidst our own human plans. Our story would have been so different if I had gone to college. 

It would have been so different if Joseph had stayed in Florida or if we had rushed into a marriage or if we had planned a wedding during a temporary deployment or if we had never surrendered.

God is faithful. You can trust Him. He DOES have a plan, and it’s always much better than mine.

Sara