What if the life you’ve always wanted, isn’t the life you’ve always hoped and prayed for?
Shannan Martin reflects on how the life she envisioned for herself was flipped on its head after her family was called to leave their comfortable life on the farm, to embrace a life full of unexpected twists and turns. She explains how she found freedom in God’s plans for her life.
“For my family, we came to see that God’s more for us was going to look like less. It seemed like day after day, month after month, we were just falling and falling, losing and surrendering, and things were being stripped from us.”
“As every one of the things was stripped away, we found more freedom. Every step back off of the ladder; every time we chose to fall deeper towards the earth, and more entrenched in the world around us, we found the freedom of living the life that God planned for us, and being rescued from the life we thought we wanted.”
We may fail to recognize God’s plans for our lives if we are too wrapped up in our own plans for the future. Shannan shares from personal experience,
“My blog at that point was called Flower Patch Farmgirl, and now I come to see that I’m being led to move into this raggedy kind of rough neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks and nothing seems to make sense. We thought we were living the “good life”; we thought we were doing what God would want from us, and to realize that we had gotten all of that wrong really rocked us.”
“It’s so upside down and it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, but that’s where we are beginning to see that when things look weird to the world around us; when people don’t understand what we’re doing, when we get a lot of curious looks and a lot of skepticism thrown our way, that’s when we tend to know that we’re kind of in that sweet spot of where the Lord wants us.”
Isaiah 55:9 reminds us that God’s thoughts and ways are higher than our own so life won’t always make sense to us. We can rest assured that where God is calling us will be a place of freedom and eternal purposes. Shannan points us to Jesus’ life for further understanding.
“You look at the life of Jesus, everything He did subverted the common culture; everything He did flew in its face and flipped it on its head. I think that it is very much the life that each one of us is called to; we’re not called to live life in the way that most culturally acceptable or relevant, we’re called to this weird way of Jesus where we’re the most free when we’re the closest to street level.”
Shannan Martin, known for her popular blog (formerly Flower Patch Farmgirl), is a speaker and writer who found her voice in the country and her story in the city. She is the author of . She and her jail-chaplain husband, Cory, have four funny children who came to them across oceans and rivers. Having sold their dream farmhouse, they now enjoy neighborhood life in Goshen, Indiana.
Finding freedom in God's plans for your life
