Jessica Levy Books

Sometimes I think I could have planned it better. My life. I could have prevented certain things from happening to me as a child and hurting me for years to come. I could have removed certain people from my life or added in more people to fill the gaps. I could have opened different doors, walked paths less traveled, prevented heartbreak, revealed different opportunities. To be fair, I did make choices that affected my life, but clearly there were plans, there were blueprints, indelibles that were out of my hands. Many are the plans in the human heart, but the Lord’s purpose prevails (Prov. 16:21). And sometimes I think I could have planned it better.

As a child I suffered an injury that pervasively affected life in my physical body. More on that later, but I remember a doctor saying when I was young that I should be able to still have children when I grew up. A young tomboy, I had no romantic dreams of becoming a wife and mother, but knowing that childbearing hadn’t been taken from me when so much else was…it represented hope. And a future.

‘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 a hope and a future.’

JEREMIAH 29:11

A few decades into that future, hope was diminishing. My husband and had tried for years but had not been successful at expanding our family. An ultrasound revealed a watermelon-sized cyst in my abdomen that had likely been an uncharted result of repeated abdominal surgeries I had as a kid. My reproductive endocrinologist was present when they removed the cyst and she later explained there was just no way. This ability, too, had been taken.

If you’ve ever experienced loss, you know that as people make efforts to comfort you, very little really does. In church circles, you often hear Jeremiah 29:11 offered as a comfort, that God has a plan that will somehow make this better. Yet – in the moment – it feels like an empty promise. If God really had a plan, how did this happen in the first place? That’s how I felt for several months. Furthermore, if he knew this was coming, why not warn me? Why allow me to hope for a future that wasn’t to be?

I imagine the Israelites in exile who first heard this promise felt much the same way. God’s plan for his chosen people included a 70-year exile in a foreign land. He definitely had plans to restore them to the promised land, but he also had a plans for them to remain in Babylon for a couple generations. Further study of the letter in Jeremiah 29 reveals instructions to settle into the land, raise their families, and pray for Babylon. Settle in and seek peace and prosperity for your captors in your time of exile, that was the plan!

In doing so, God’s people learned how to live out his plans. In verse 12, they learned how to call on him and pray to him, in verse 13, how to seek him with all of their hearts. I learned the same when I was in the season of learning how to live out God’s plan. Sure, the Israelites knew that in 70 years they would be restored to their land, and that was God’s long term plan, but the point of the 70-year exile was to change their hearts. That was the plan.

We imagine we could plan it better because we would plan it easier. We would side-step the hard times, the loss, the pain, and ensure comfort, happiness. At what price, though? What would be the condition of our hearts? God may have plans to bring us physical prosperity, to protect us from physical harm, to bring us hope in what delights us, to bring us a future that we want.

Or maybe those aren’t his plans at all.

In my experience, it is in the exile times that my heart learns to become prosperous in his riches, those of love, joy, peace, and patience. It is in the exile times that my heart learns to have faith that protects me from emotional and spiritual harm. It is in the times when my plans are dashed that I find I can stand on hope that goes beyond what I can see in my future and rest firmly on the plans God has for my life, knowing that I am secure in his purpose. I don’t yet know if God’s plans for me include children, but as I have learned to trust him, I know his plans are to give me a hope and a future.

And that’s good (enough) for me.