Have you ever had dreams and plans for life, started down the path to achieving them, and then looked around you and wondered why where you are doesn’t seem to relate to all you started trying to achieve? Sometimes, that can be exciting, we can be further along than expected. Other times, it can be incredibly frustrating, with a side order of unmet expectations and unfulfilled dreams.

Detours Lead to Questions

I got married for the first time at 19. My dreams for that marriage were pretty standard; I think: grow old together, have lots of children, buy a house, sell it after a few years, travel some and then have some Grand kids running around. Things did not go the way I expected. I have a beautiful daughter from that marriage, but when it ended, I was left with a lot of questions. There were so many questions about myself, God, and my future as a single mum. I wondered how on earth this had happened. My reality was so far from my plan.

I have been married to my second husband for close to sixteen years now. Again, I had many dreams and plans for this marriage, and they also involved many children, houses, and travel. My husband has a son, we blended our family, but we weren’t able to have any more children. We don’t own a house any more, and we haven’t done a lot of travel. The dream to have more children in particular was an incredibly hard one to let go of, I grieved it for a long time. Once again, my master plan looked nothing like the reality I was standing in.

Always Keep Moving Forward

We don’t go from A to B in a nice straight line. My experiences in life have taught me that life’s paths aren’t linear. We take steps forward; we go back a few steps. There might need to be a side step and then another step up. Somewhere, there could be a stop on a platform for a while. Sometimes, we go around in a circle and end up where we started. It’s easy to become frozen when life is not how you dreamed it would be. Discouragement can cause us to stop moving altogether, paralysed by our own unmet dreams and unfulfilled expectations. Even if our steps are small, it’s important to keep moving forward.

Unfulfilled Dreams Can Be Pivotal Moments

If life were linear, I wonder if we would have the character development we need to live in community with other people. The situations that we encounter along the way that seem at the time to be the most painful detours can be the situations that produce the most growth in us. Those side steps that seem like heartbreak and unfulfilled dreams can be the steps that lead to pivotal moments in our futures.

There is a passage in the bible in John 15 :4-5, where it talks about how we are like the branches of a grapevine and Jesus is like the vine. It says that we are to remain in him. Without the vine (Jesus) we can’t produce fruit. Life is not linear, and brings plenty of detours along the way, but these become so much harder when we don’t navigate them in partnership with Jesus. We can continue to walk through the difficult situations that we face because we know that we don’t do it alone. When we walk it with him, he will produce good things out of the painful detours in our lives.