When I was growing up, I was taught that if you worked hard, got an education and found a good job, there was no material thing you couldn’t acquire. And if you waited for the right spouse, you’d have 2.5 kids, a dog (or a cat…no discrimination here 🙂 !) and a white picket fence around your dream home just the way you’d planned it.
And for many years that ideology worked for me,…for many of us, for all intents and purposes.
Then Sept. 11th, 2001 happened and our perceptions of being safe were shattered.
In 2005, Katrina taught us that owning land or property didn’t insulate us from it being taken away.
Then, in 2008, the Great Recession happened and many of us realized we couldn’t fall back on that college degree when the companies we worked for were going under.

Almost everything I, and many others were taught, believed in and followed after, got flipped upside down.  Literally.

I and several of my friends, family, co-workers and peers, began losing those things we had held dear. Some of us lost careers due to downsizing or going out of business. Some of us lost homes to foreclosure or disaster. Some of us lost relationships to circumstances like divorce, abuse, disease and addictions. Some of us lost loved ones to tragedies like crime, prison, homelessness…and even, death.  Everything we thought ensured our future…all the “right” things we may have done, didn’t always protect us from the “crash and burn” our country has faced these past few years, or from life, in general.  For many of us, young and old, alike, the scripts we wrote for our lives got “flipped” on us and we were left with unanswered questions, particularly this one:  “How do we pick up the pieces and move on?”

I am learning that gaining the answer to that question, though vital to my growth and understanding, has cost a great price because it entails me letting go of my own plans and holding on to God as He directs my steps and orders my life’s plan…His way.

In other words, I’m learning that it’s time to…Throw away OUR scripts!

As we learn to live unscripted we stop limiting God and His plans for us.  Jeremiah 29: 10, 11  (The Message Bible) states: “This is God’s Word on the subject: “As soon as Babylon’s seventy years are up and not a day before, I’ll show up and take care of you as I promised and bring you back home. I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for.”