I’m very much a worrywart. I worry about all sorts of things, from whether or not the diet coffee I ordered at Starbucks was actually diet to whether or not I’ll ever have kids. (Perhaps I’ll be the kind of person who doesn’t have a family of her own but comes to regard her handbags as her children…okay, fine, I already do that!).
If I think back on all the wonders of my life, though, none of them came about from worry or planning. Instead, they all came unexpectedly from God.
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It’s like this photo I came across at my parents’ house over the holidays last year. It was sitting on my mom’s dresser. A class photo about the size of a business card, black and white. I asked my mom about it. She said it was taken on Children’s Day when she was in the third grade in Midyat, Turkey, where my parents were born. “Your dad and I are both in it,” she said.
I was instantly intrigued. My parents met in the first grade. Apparently, my dad came home from his first day at school and told my grandmother he’d found his future wife. They attended elementary school together, went to different high schools and eventually my dad went off to the U.S. for college. It wasn’t until he graduated and returned home one summer that they reunited.
I squinted at the photo, hoping to find some evidence that they were meant to be. But the photo was too small for me to make out the faces. I found a magnifying glass. When I finally spotted my parents, I couldn’t help but laugh. Their personalities seemed so much the same! There was my mom on the left side of the photo, her hands on her hips, as sassy as ever. And my dad, on the opposite side, striking a pretty fierce pose of his own.
There weren’t any clues that they were destined to end up together, though. It’s not like my dad was staring at my mom across his side of the photo, making heart-shaped gestures with his hands. And yet the fact that there was no clear sign they were meant to be made it all the more amazing to me. Who could’ve known when that photo was taken that those two fierce-looking kids would one day get married? Or that the photograph would travel all the way from southeastern Turkey in my dad’s suitcase when he moved to the U.S. in 1965?
I know my dad hoped for those things (he always says he had three goals growing up: to marry my mom, to move to the U.S. and to become an engineer). But there was no guarantee any of that would ever happen.
When I look at that photo I’m reminded of how beautifully complex life is. How you never really know what miracles God has in store for you. Even if there’s no evidence, no sign, no clue that your hopes and dreams will ever come to pass, God is working things out in way that’s too wondrous to even comprehend.
That’s something I’m going to try to remind myself of the next time my inner worrywart comes out!
