The Grace of Not Getting What I Wanted

Gratitude for the things that have gone awry.

Last week I was on campus of my alma mater, just enjoying a day of remote work. As I watched the students come in and out of the building where I took many of my classes, I couldn’t help but wonder what hopes, dreams, worries, and curiosities they might have about what is happening in their lives now…and also what comes next. While I wish I could’ve been more present during my college years, I confess that I spent much of them wondering what I’d do after graduation. What job would I get? Where would I live? Who would I marry and when? And of course: would I find a haircut that actually suited me?

9 years ago, the week before my college’s Thanksgiving break, I got rejected from a post-grad fellowship program I was hoping to get into. As a backup, I had an interview lined up for another program in Pittsburgh—my second choice, but one I felt pretty confident I would get accepted to. After attending the interview (a double doozie lunch AND group interview), I left feeling less confident and eventually got rejected from that program, too.

At the time, I felt extremely embarrassed to be rejected, and I felt distraught about what direction my life was going to go if the plans I thought were best weren’t working out. It seemed like everyone else was headed in the right direction—secure jobs, promising romantic prospects, haircuts that were already good. All these years later, I can now see the rejection(s) and redirection(s) I’ve experienced as a grace and a gift—a diversion down a life path that required me to make mistakes and grow from them, to take chances, to learn how to be lonely and form friendships in unexpected places and with unexpected people. The life I have now is not the one I envisioned when I was 21 and crying in my college’s cafeteria about not getting to move to Charlottesville, Virginia. And I now believe it is God’s mercy that we do not always get what we want.

Photo taken at sunrise, November 20, 2024.

The life I have today as a 30-year-old woman is not the life I would’ve chosen in 2023, nor the one I optimistically imagined when I was a college freshman or earnestly hoped for when I was a college senior. But I count this, too, as a gift. In my notes app a few months ago, I wrote down this vague thought: “2024 has been the year I found out the playbook doesn’t exist.”

If you’re my friend or a consistent reader, you’re probably tired of hearing about this, but a year ago today, I experienced a very bad injury in my back. Ironically, I sustained this injury the day before Thanksgiving. There’s something deeply poetic and even theological about that timing: there I was, hobbling around in profound pain as the table before me was spread with good food with my family seated around it.

I wanted to be mad at God for my injury and the challenges that came out of it, but that Thanksgiving Eve marked the beginning of a year of God showing me that out of our ruined plans and (literally) crippling disappointments, we can still find ourselves seated before a profound feast of blessing, encouragement, community, and life. Give thanks, for the Psalmist was right: “If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.”

In this year and all the ones that have come before it, I can see with greater clarity that God has used the hard times in my life to show me that I am cared for, known, and loved—even in times when I have so very little to give back or feel grateful for. There’s an old prayer I’ve come across a few places that is fitting for this sentiment: “For all the blessings, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, we give thee thanks.”

As I reflect on a life-changing year, I feel like gratitude has become my most sincere prayer and praise. Last weekend, I ran to a bench on the bike path that I’ve run to probably hundreds of times. When training for a race, it was my turnaround spot for my easy hour runs—a route I did on autopilot. But the thing is, I hadn’t run to that bench in almost 12 months. And so, on my run to the bench and back, each step felt like an opportunity to give thanks. When I finished, I looked down at the weird sweat stains on my inner elbows and saw them not as embarrassing evidence that I could’ve used another layer of Degree Clinical Strength, but as a mark of healing.

I count it all as grace. I offer it all as praise. For all my plans that have gone awry, God never ceased in interceding for my good. And so I join the voices of the saints and sinners that have come before me in praying that old prayer: “For all the blessings, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, we give thee thanks.”