God’s Script

Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails. (Proverbs 19:21)

            I remember when I first saw him at the weekly City of Chattanooga press conference. David was a radio news reporter and I worked for the local television station.  As I looked at his 6’10 frame, I thought, “He’s pretty cute!’  I asked him where he moved from.  “Texas,” he replied. “I was amazed because I was from Texas as well. Then I asked him where he attended college, “Texas Lutheran,” he said.  “Texas Lutheran in Seguin?” I exclaimed. That’s where I went to college. I’m not sure he shared my enthusiasm.  I realized that we had just missed each other because David was two years younger than me and had transferred in to play basketball.  I had also played basketball at Texas Lutheran.

            I had recently gone through a difficult breakup with a different boyfriend so I thought God had seen my heartbreak and dropped this young man into Chattanooga for me. What else could all these similarities mean?  As it turned out, we dated steadily for about a year but in the end, it did not lead to matrimony.  However, in that stretch of dating, I became close friends with David’s mother and family. I’d spend weekend’s at his family’s house and hours in the kitchen talking to his mom.  Half the time, I didn’t even know where David was while I was with his mom.  Those were precious times as I was unable to have those girl times with my own mother because of her mental illness.  I desperately wanted Joyce to be my mother-in-law.

            When David and I broke up, neither his mother nor I wanted to let each other go and we never did.  She adopted me as her daughter and I adopted her as my mother.  I helped her through a crisis years ago and now I will be there for her through another crisis, the death of her son, David, who passed away after complications from heart surgery this week. He was only 53.

            As I write this from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where this all started, I am preparing to attend David’s celebration of life service.  I am realizing once again, God’s script for our life is never exactly as we write it.  My dating relationship with David was more about developing a close bond with his mom, Joyce. I needed her then and she needs me now. In the week before David’s death, I shared her burden and cried out to God on my knees, praying for a miraculous recovery but it wasn’t in God’s plan. 

            Isn’t it amazing how God brings these relationships around?  Once the former girlfriend, now a friend of the family and sister in Christ.  That is called spiritual maturity.   For the family’s sake, I wish David had lived, but again, God wrote a different ending.
How about you?  How has your life script been re-written by God?