For as long as she can remember, Grace Thornton had a pretty good idea of how her life should go. And it would most certainly involve marriage and a family.
But as she reached her mid-twenties and her friends’ engagement and birth announcements started to pile up, she started to question. Did she do something wrong? Where was God in all of this?
“People would say things, very well meaning things, like, ‘You know, this is great. Now you have all this extra time to focus on your relationship with God!’ And so it was almost like – ‘Now that I don’t have what I really want – I have this time to focus on God.’ So it was kind of like He was almost a consolation prize.”
Eventually, Grace came to realize that she was waiting for her life to happen to her, instead of stepping out in faith into the adventure that God had for her.
“I would say that if you’re in that spot, He’s not your consolation prize. He is your very best life. It may not look like you expected, but if you will surrender to Him just for the purpose of knowing Him, it will be the best story in the end for you. Surrendering to Him to get closer to Him. He is so worth it.”
For a lot of us, our natural approach is to want to hold on to everything in our life and handle things ourselves. But Grace has learned that isn’t the route to fulfillment.
“I think that sometimes the tendency is to just maybe hold on to things to the point where we can’t give Him everything. Just say, ‘Just give me all of you! I don’t want anything else more than I want you!'”
Grace Thornton is a journalist, a globe trotting speaker & the author of I Don’t Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God’s Plan for You.
On the Road with Grace Thornton
