When Everything Seems to Go in the Wrong Direction

The picture that makes me tremble

Seven years have passed since that time when you were eighteen and chose to follow your heart instead of expectations. Now you're twenty-five and you're running. Not physically. But inside you feel like a fugitive.

I'm holding the seventh picture from the album. You sitting on the edge of the bed in a studio apartment that doesn't even remotely resemble the life you had dreamed. Unpaid bills on the table. Resumes sent to dozens of places with no response. Eyes asking themselves if that choice seven years ago was the biggest mistake of your life.

"Do you see this moment, little one?" I whisper while looking at this picture that breaks my heart more than all the others. "This is the day you'll discover that following God doesn't mean everything will go smoothly. But it means that even when everything goes wrong, you're never alone."

And you'll discover that sometimes God speaks louder in the darkness than in the light.

The picture comes alive and I relive your nightmare that's also mine. I see you waking up every morning staring at the peeling ceiling, wondering where all those dreams went that shone in your eyes at eighteen. I see you scrolling through photos of your former classmates on social media: married, beautiful homes, established careers, lives that seem perfect.

And you feeling like a failure.

"Mom, maybe you were right," you'll tell me that evening on the phone, with a broken voice. "Maybe I should have chosen the safe path. Maybe I threw everything away for an illusion."

And my mother's heart will break because I won't know whether to hug you or shake you. Because I too, in the secret of my heart, will have asked myself a thousand times if I shouldn't have protected you more from yourself.

But then I'll remember Jacob.

Jacob who at twenty-five was running away. He had ruined everything with his brother. He had disappointed his father. He had to leave home, family, everything he knew to escape Esau's anger who wanted to kill him.

He found himself alone, in the middle of nowhere, with a stone as a pillow.

If Facebook had existed, his friends would have posted photos of their perfect lives while he slept in the open. If WhatsApp had existed, his mother Rebecca would have written him: "Son, maybe you should have thought before deceiving your brother."

Jacob fell asleep that night thinking he had ruined everything.

And he woke up knowing he was loved.

Because that night God spoke to him in a dream. Not to scold him. Not to tell him "I told you so." To tell him the most incredible thing Jacob had ever heard:

"I am with you. I will watch over you wherever you go. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." (Genesis 28:15, NIV)

To a fugitive. To someone who had messed up everything. To someone who felt like a failure.

Little one, when that evening you cry on the phone and tell me you feel lost, when you look at your life and see only ruins where once there were dreams, I'll tell you about that night of Jacob's.

I'll tell you that God didn't bring you this far to abandon you. That choice to follow your heart at eighteen wasn't stupidity. It was obedience.

And that this dark period isn't the end of your story. It's the chapter where you learn to trust even when you can't see the road.

"I am with you" doesn't mean "everything will always go well". It means "even when everything goes badly, you're not falling into emptiness. You're falling into My arms".

And do you know what will happen, little one? One morning you'll wake up and instead of looking at the peeling ceiling with despair, you'll look at it with gratitude. Because you'll understand that this studio apartment isn't a prison. It's a school.

A school where you learned that your identity doesn't depend on your bank account. That your worth isn't measured by what you do but by who you are. That true happiness doesn't come from things that work but from the certainty of being loved even when nothing works.

And like Jacob, who upon waking said: "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it," (Genesis 28:16, NIV) you too will look at that dark period and say: "Truly God was with me even there, and I didn't see it."

Because that studio apartment, those unpaid bills, those ignored resumes, weren't signs that God had abandoned you. They were the sign that He was preparing you for something bigger than you could imagine.

Three months after that phone call, when the call that changes everything finally comes - not the job you hoped for but the one God had prepared for you - you'll understand that every "no" you received was God protecting you from roads that seemed right but weren't yours.

And when, ten years later, you look back at that period, you won't call it "the time when everything went wrong" anymore. You'll call it "the time when I learned to trust".

The time when you discovered that God doesn't promise you an easy road. He promises to be on the road with you.

Sleep, little Jacob in flight.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about that time when you'll be thirty years old and discover that sometimes God uses storms to bring you exactly where you need to be.

--Mama who knows that God transforms every flight into a journey home