Making God Laugh

I hear the saying a lot that is you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. I think I used to do that a lot.

I seem to be one of those annoying people who enjoys making plans, knowing where her life is going to be in five years, ten years, twenty. I just want to know. I like surprises on some level, but not on others. Or at least I used to hate surprises. Now I enjoy taking off on tangents. I would still be called predictable and cautious for the most part. And I would say the same about myself.

My plans were close to those of many woman raised after feminism went out of vogue. A white picket fence, a nice husband, 2.5 kids, no dog though. I don't really like dogs. I thought I would go to university, get a degree in something, find a job for a little while, get married and stay home raising kids for most of my life. In the past few years plans, or I suppose the presence of plans, have changed in some ways.

I am in university now, and I plan on being in university for at least another two years. Probably six more years in order to get a Masters degree. I think that's the only part of my plans that remain from my high school days. A part of me desperately wants to cling to the dreams I had at sixteen, regardless of how childish and immature they may have been. Somehow, regardless of how childish they were, how unedcuated about life those dreams may have made me seem, they were mine. They were what I could hang on to, the plans that I felt would get me through.

Now I don't have the safety net of plans. I have the comfort of dreams, but no safety net of plans. Every day I get the feeling that I'm stepping off the edge of a cliff. I don't know how far the drop is going to be and I'm never entirely sure that there will be someone at the bottom to catch me. The upside to this is that the ride can be one truly great time.

While I may not be amusing my Creator quite as much as I used to, I am learning to take the steps away from what I know and what I planned. Some days it can be more difficult than I had entirely expected it to be. It's hard to take the step off the edge when there isn't always someone there to catch you. Even when there's not though, the thrill of falling is enough to override the fear of not being caught!