What are you being prepared for? Read that carefully.

It does not say, what are you preparing for. It does ask what you are being prepared for.

When you prepare yourself for something, you usually know what you would like the desired outcome to be. When you are being prepared for something, you may not even know what that something is.

Let me explain. There are our plans for life and then there is God’s plan for our life. We work diligently to prepare for all of what we see in front of us and what we want our lives to look like. When God works through our lives to take us not only where he wants us to be, but where we need to be, preparation can  be a little different than what we might expect.

As we approach Christmas, I think about Mary and Joseph and the huge turn their lives took. They were planning and preparing for their normal lives and ended up with something much different and so much better than they could have imagined. I’m not sure what they went through prior to that first Christmas other than some visits from an angel. But I can promise you that God choose them on purpose and made sure that they were ready for his plans.

One of the first things I think of when I think of how our lives have gone the last eight years is that this is not the life we dreamed of having. But the challenges, joy, and personal growth we have experienced, are all that has made us ready for where we are today.

I think one requirement and the first step in preparing for the life God has in store for you is a reckoning of your relationships. You’ve got to ‘get right’ with yourself, with God, and those in your life. I want to add that, this reckoning does not mean that you will find perfection in all of these relationships. What it does mean is that you have to lay it out there as honestly as you are able. You’ve got to be squared up before you can if you expect to walk straight.

This can be a pretty painful and uncomfortable but the rewards are beyond imagining. I think that in preparation for family life and being parents this can be especially difficult.

When we give up our control, sometimes in large part because life has left us little choice, something pretty incredible can follow. All of that preparation, planned or not, will pay off. The moments and struggles in your life are preparing you for something God has in your future and it is good.

That being said, we are making progress with our next home. Construction started about two weeks ago and we couldn’t be more excited! We should be moving in during the upcoming spring. Monkey is doing awesome and has put on some serious pounds over the last six months. #3 turned two and started acting it about two weeks early. Princess is just getting to be too big and can’t wait until she gets her own room, but is still pretty sure she’ll be sleeping in her Bubba’s room for now.

I hope that you all have a very Merry Christmas! Remember that you are being prepared for something. It will not necessarily be what you imagined but it will be what you need and it will be good and exactly what God has in mind.