God's plans are not my own...but sometimes they are

In the middle of Christ - being hung on a cross...and for the first time in His existence, being apart from God...He takes the sins of the world  upon Himself, and in that moment forever takes the sins of those in the past, those in the present, and those yet to come...upon Himself...in His perfect being He becomes our punishment and in that moment we have been redeemed!

The first time I truly understood this was when I was 15 years old...and heard the story of Christ for the hundredth time...but this time I got it...I understood it...I knew what it meant....

My story started many years before that...this is where it began...

Looking back...where God brought me from...

part 1...

I am such a young person…someone with dreams and ideals that go beyond what is considered the norm.  

I spoke during graduation from High School, not as the valedictorian,  because I didn’t have the  grades to get me there,  but because I just wanted  to.  I had something to say, and a voice that couldn’t be hushed.  I had my friend who had homing pigeons bring a dozen of them to  graduation.  I had 12 different people hide the pigeons  beneath their robes,  and during  my speech I talked about “letting  our wings out and to be free..” During this time I had the people with the pigeons release them into the sky and the entire audience and I watched as they disappeared into the horizon. It was a time for me to realize that my dreams reached beyond the horizon.  I had ideas that would not be stopped by the constraints that society had put on me.

At 17 years old I joined the military.  My sweet mother had to go to the  Army recruitment center to sign my life away.  I would be 18 when I graduated, so the reality was  I didn’t  need her consent, but I was  so  definite about what I was going to do that I wanted to make the decision permanent.  So she came, seeing in my eyes and in my heart that this is what was going to happen.

Military in my family was not something huge.  Both of my great uncles had spent time in World War II, but it was rarely talked about.   But somewhere along the way, my heart realized what it meant to be a patriot.  One year, when I was quite young, I had told my dad that we were celebrating “fire cracker day” and he gave me that look - you know the look - the look that says you crossed the line.  He quickly explained to me that this was NOT fire cracker day, but Independence Day…the day that the United States could not denied what they had fought so hard for, for what others thought we were supposed to be. That day I became a die-hard patriot.  My heart cries out every time the National Anthem is sung…my heart soars with the pledge of allegiance, and my back is straight as I salute the flag that is shown before me…I am a patriot true and true.  My 9 years in the military, and knowing that I would give my life to my country is not something I understood lightly – it is something that I believed and believe to my core.  It is something I have tried to ingrain into my child…the pride of what it means to be an American…that God gave us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that it was our job to ensure that others had that same right.

And in the midst of all of that...I realized what it was to be a child of God.  I was not my own, I was His.  His to direct, and His to guide to make me who I was.