Birds of a feather...

The walls of my new apartment are bare. I still don't have any decorations or pictures hung. I've been trying to decide how to decorate. My old apartment never felt like home, so I never hung anything on the walls. My new apartment already feels like home. It feels like I should have pictures and settle in. So, in the last week or so, I've been busy ordering frames and picking out new photographs to have printed of my kids and my grandkids and have reprints of my parents’ wedding pictures done.

It occurred to me one day, as I was going through all these old pictures of my kids and my family, that a lot of these pictures bring about a feeling of sadness and hurt.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think most people have this vision in their head of pointing at the picture and laughing and telling old stories, like a scene in a movie. But that wasn't the case as I was going through those old pictures by myself. Some brought about smiles, but the feeling that I ended up with was sadness and hurt. I realized in the end, I didn't have all those happy, joyous memory feelings that the movie scene in my head wanted.

It's not that I felt an ‘angry’ hurt. It was a feeling of - I didn't do a good enough job as mom or I wish I had done more as a mom and a daughter and a sister - that feeling of “I didn't uphold my end of the deal” and I wish I had done things differently. It was a feeling of regret and sadness, and wishing I could do it all over again.

So, I sat in that feeling for a few days, and then I took a day and I really thought about. If I could do it over again, what would I do different? Every time I picked an event in my life that I wished I could do over again, what I realized was, if I changed it, then I changed the outcome, the result. If I had never married a particular person, then I wouldn't have my children. And if I hadn’t trusted a particular person, then I wouldn't have another person in my life. Everything I would have changed, I realized changed an outcome of something else. Outcomes that would have not only changed my life, but would have changed the lives of my children.

And believe it or not, even though I know I screwed up the lives of my children, there are parts of me that also know that my kids are better off the way things were than the way it could have been. Maybe my imperfections were part of the plan. As hard as that is for me to accept, maybe that was part of God’s plan.

I look back at my own childhood and I could have wished for so much ‘different’ but look at what God's done with my life. He took all those things that could have defeated me and turned them into something wonderful. I love that He can use even me and all my imperfections to do what I'm doing right now. Only God can do that. And maybe He will do the same for all those people that I love dearly and that I totally messed up with. Maybe He will use all those imperfections, those difficulties, to grow their faith into something wonderful.

There's a story I tell at the shelter sometimes to give encouragement to those that need it. It's the story of the flamingo. Flamingos are born with no pink. They are born grey, then turn white, and they have absolutely no means of turning pink at birth. If we raised them in our backyard in Kansas, they would stay white their entire lives. They only turn shades of pink or orange because of what they eat and where they eat - usually in some sort of salt flat environment. Because they eat the algae and the crustaceans, like brine shrimp, the carotene in the brine shrimp and the algae interacts with what's in their body and turns them whatever shade of pink or orange color. Where they live determines what shade of color they are.

So, if we compare our lives to the flamingo, we have to endure something - the salty crustaceans and algae - to become our true colors. And what we become, what color ultimately shines through, isn’t up to us, that is up to God. He chooses where we land, what we are capable of going through, and in the end, the colors that we fly away with, for they are part of His plan too.

Jeremiah 29:11

NIV For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.