Unfit for entry into the ADF (Australian Defense Force). With that one statement her son’s dreams sank heavily to the bottom of her heart. He has asthma.
‘Kinda feels like nothing big in my life is going my way,’ he wrote.
She squeezed her eyes shut and gulped. He was on the other side of the world. Her arms hung useless, longing to hold him, hold the heavy weight of those words for him.
He’d missed out on studying the course he wanted by one point off one point. He’d found out the day he left his home.
He had to wade through paperwork and lots of unknown to start a new life in a land almost foreign to him. Start studying at university, adapt to the language, the standards, the clothes, the people.
Halfway through the year his heart broke as distance robbed the warmth of first love.
And now another dream lays shattered.
‘Keep your eyes on the little things then, and we’ll trust Him together with the big,’ she writes back.
There are many, many little things. Living with grandparents he has barely known for most of his life. Joining a cycling club. Meeting a great bunch of guys at Uni. Playing drums at church. Swimming. Adapting to change like an absolute pro. Chocolate covered liquorice.
Maybe He knows something we don’t. Although it hurts and feels like one brick wall after another, His plans, not our own, are always better.
She thinks about all he has walked through and marvels at the way he has grown, faced the setbacks and heartaches, found himself held by One who knows, who sees, who understands, whose plans are better because they are carefully laid knowing the future.
She clings to this verse: ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future,’ Jeremiah 29:11. And she’s grateful for little things, like chocolate covered liquorice.