Made for More

Chapter 1
How I Found Myself Here

I had my entire life planned out. I was going to be the perfect person. I would be an incredible wife, a rock-star mom, a successful businesswoman, and a loyal friend.
Do you want to know what my superpower was? Perfection.
Perfection seemed to come naturally to me, and I made it my pinnacle of success. Imperfection meant failure. I held myself and everyone around me to this standard.
I am capable of looking at every situation and making it a worldly success. I can create order out of chaos. I can see situations coming at me and plan accordingly so that they do not hurt my meticulously put-together life. I process. I plan. I make everything perfect, which makes me feel successful.
Or so I thought.
My husband, Scott, and I said yes to adoption, and that’s where I can pinpoint the beginning of my grand ideals slipping through my fingertips. I’m forever grateful that God was gracious enough to pull me out of my mind-set of perfection. God used our family’s adoption calling to begin to set me free from my prison.
I learned quickly that adoption and orphan care do not fit into a nice, tidy box. Adoption and orphan care do not always sync with full-time office jobs or five-year plans.
My plan was to be a working mom. I could do it. In my mind, that was what I was created to do. But after we came home from China, I walked away from my job. It was more than that to me though. I felt like I was walking away from my entire career, which had become my identity. I was losing a huge part of who I was. It was one of the hardest seasons that I’ve walked through. My entire life changed, and everything began to shift. I questioned. I cried. And then I cried some more.
Life has a way of throwing at us hard seasons that wake us up to be loved by God in a way we’ve never experienced. Maybe a sickness. Maybe the birth or death of a child. Maybe an adoption. Maybe a whisper when you cry out to God because you are sick of trying to be perfect.
For me, I began to realize that no matter how perfect I tried to be as a mom I couldn’t heal all of the hurts my children experience. I realized that my small-minded idea of the perfect career wasn’t aligning with God’s immeasurable calling on my life. I also began to see how unfair and limiting it was to hold my husband, friends, family members, colleagues, and mentors to my personal definition of success.
God took my perfect world and slowly peeled it away from me. I’ve never clung to God more than when I realized I needed Him to fill in the cracks that had formed as my carefully crafted life crumbled to the floor like a cookie in my three-year-old’s hand.
Actually, my life didn’t just crumble. It crashed. More like the Buzz Lightyear action figure that my son thinks may actually fly at some point if he continually throws it into the air.
But then, through my confusion and tears—because I just threw my entire career out the window—I heard God whisper, “You were made for more.” I finally began to believe that God had another plan for me. He had more for me than my safe plans of sitting behind a computer screen in an oversized office chair. More than my small mind could ask or imagine. His plans would be immeasurable.
I knew He wanted me to write. He wanted to create beauty out of my unplanned season.