You can't always get what you want.

Something that I'm finally figuring out as I'm getting older is that I don't know anyone who has it all and I don't know anyone who has nothing. By all, I mean joy, faith, money, marriage, true love, children, career, education, free time, house, car, etc.. There are people who have some of these things (a few may even have most of them), but I don't know anyone who has all or nothing. What I'm also starting to realize is that the things that a person wants more than anything else in the world are usually the things that will be the most difficult for them to attain. The things that don't matter much to them will often come easily and without much thought.

Some things have come easily to me and I have barely thought about them because they weren't things that I was super concerned with. I live in a beautiful house with my room facing a canal and it's across the street from the beach... I'm always amazed that I ended up here because it wasn't anything that I was looking for or that I cared much about. I've always been more concerned with having a roof over my head than with what the place looks like or where it's located. That was never anything that mattered much to me and I think the reason I ended up here is because I didn't care and I got to appreciate that GOD was blessing me. It wasn't something that I controlled. I didn't look for this place, it just happened that Chris needed 3 other roommates and she asked me to be one of them. It also ended up that I discovered great friendships with the other girls who live here.

This has also happened with a few of the jobs that I've had. When I first got out of college, it was really difficult for me to find a job that I felt at peace with and I remember searching for 8 months to find a place that fit what I was looking for. It ended up that I started working with adults with developmental disabilities and found that I loved it. Finding that first job was incredibly hard, but everything after that has fallen into place because I found my niche in teaching people with disabilities. I haven't had many worries about my career path since that period of time when I was 22 years old because of knowing what I need to do as a career.

I look at friends who are dealing with infertility and it's so devastating for them because all they want during this life is to have a baby of their own to love. There are others out there who didn't care much about whether they had a child and ended up pregnant as soon as they decided to try. I look at the kids at Royal Family Kids' Camp and think about how so many of their parents didn't want to have kids and didn't want to take responsibility for them. Those kids were born into abusive, neglectful families, yet it was so easy for their moms to get pregnant with them.

I have spent the majority of my life wanting to fall in love and get married more than anything. It's something that has even been an idol at some points because I wanted to know what it was like SO badly. I keep trying to surrender it, but then a nice guy comes along and I think, "this might be it and it's finally going to be easy." It never is, though, and there's always some curveball that gets thrown in there to prevent anything from happening. It has become very discouraging and I don't think it would be that way if I just didn't care about it. Instead, I usually end up thinking that God is laughing at me when it comes to this area of my life. I know He's not, I know that I need to trust Him, and I know that it truly will be easy when the right man comes into my life. He really is protecting me, but I still tend to get upset about it because it just keeps happening over and over in different, random ways.

I guess my thoughts on all of this are that God truly does give people the desires of their hearts because He is the one who plants them in there. I think our deepest desires are usually the ones that are the most difficult to attain because God wants us to appreciate them more once He eventually does give them to us. I just need to keep my focus on God by depending on Him alone and not having my thoughts dwell as much on the things in my life that I want to happen.