This wasn’t supposed to be my story.
These words found their way into my thoughts as I pulled towels out of the dryer and began folding them. A year and half into being married, at thirty years of age, I was home without a job. Each day, my most pressing responsibilities were doing laundry and making dinner.
I was a stay at home wife.
I never thought I’d be a stay at home wife. Even if we decided to have kids, I always pictured myself as the working mom. But now, I was what I had judged other women so harshly for—my husband was supporting me while I was learning the daytime TV schedule. Reruns of Grey’s Anatomy began at lunch time and ran until three. Gilmore Girls began at four. And in between folding laundry and watching my shows, I was left to contemplate,
Did I make a mistake?
I had left a job I loved, without a plan of what I was going to do next. Sure, I also left an unhealthy situation with no room for growth. And I left with wounds I had still yet to name. But as I folded laundry, all I felt was grief. I felt like I had lost more than I gained.
Sometimes, we can make the right choice and it can feel terrible from beginning to end. We can even continue to feel awful for months or even years after. But this does not mean we made the wrong choice.
One of the worst “What if” questions we can face is the fear we are going to make a mistake. That we are going to choose the wrong path. The real fear behind this is that we are going to end up in bad place. A place where we’re no longer admired, where we look or feel like a failure, a place of pain and possibly shame.
Sometimes, we can make the right choice and it can feel terrible from beginning to end…But this does not mean we made the wrong choice.
When I left my career in church ministry, it felt like a significant part of my life had imploded. Even though I had pulled the trigger, the change was shocking. For months on end, I felt like I was standing at ground zero of my life with no idea of how to pick up the pieces. Even though I knew deep down I had made the right decision, I felt like a failure.
There are times even the right choice brings us to the lowest place we have ever been. Where it is hard to look people in the eye and tell them we are not working. Where we find ourselves in a pit and we have no idea how we are going to climb out. In other words,
Making the right choice doesn’t always determine our fate.
There is only so much we can do to make our best decisions possible (I actually share my seven steps to making a good decision here). The rest is up to the world around us and Jesus. But here is what I am learning about finding ourselves in the very places we’d never choose—whether we made the right decision or not:
We will survive.
Just as the world keeps going, so do we. Eventually, the grieving and the sting of loss or failure lessen. We learn to take small steps out of the depths we’ve found ourselves in. We make new connections, find new paths, and even begin to heal.
We are still us.
All the things we are good at, are still there. All our strengths don’t go away because the way we used to express them ended. It just means we get to discover how they fit in new environments and how they serve new people.
We are better for it.
Whether we make the wrong choice and things go south, or we make the right choice and things are still hard, we are given a rare opportunity to grow. For me, looking back, leaving gave me the chance to find out who I am on my own and pursue an entirely different path. Suffering can be incredibly painful whether it comes by our own choosing or not. But if we let it, it can also be an incredible tool to shape us into our best selves.
Where are you afraid of making the wrong choice?
Where is it worth taking the risk anyway?
Are you in the midst of making a decision? Contemplating a life change? If so, you may be interested in my FREE Making Changes Checklist that I give to all my email friends. Want your free copy? subscribe here.
Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash
