“Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others’ choices make us.”

Richie Norton

It started with the divorce. And it seems to have continued
with unintentional acts of procrastination, haggardness, and dismal outlook.

Continuing my revelations about how divorce has affected me and what the future (God’s plan) holds for me, I came to another realization this last week. I realize I have succumbed to the very worst obstacle to walking out my destiny – my weakness of being unintentional.

As if a prophecy had years ago been uttered about how my
life would turn out, I’ve allowed fate – life – to determine what has become of
my life the last couple of years.

When my wife left the marriage, it felt as if a clock within me stopped, and I fell useless, sorrowful, and deterred from the great plans God had for me. For us. And for the last couple years since that incident, I’ve crawled across the floor, weak and ineffectual, trying to make it another day, to another minuscule goal, to keep my head barely afloat amidst bills, car issues, and other of life’s causalities.  

But the problem hasn’t been the problems. It’s been my lack
of intention.

When planning, when striving toward what I know I’m supposed
to do – with my writing, the publishing company, my life in general – I’ve
allowed circumstances, consequences, and emotions to craft the finished form of
those things, instead of being intentional and making certain these goals,
these dreams, turned out the way I wanted them to.

Divorce felt like defeat. The worst defeat one can experience, I would venture to bet. For me, it wasn’t just my wife leaving the marriage. It was the dream – the promise – that we were both holding to God for being shattered across the floor, dashed into millions of fragments.

And I looked at that incident as the end of the dream. The end of God’s promise to me. And so, with the end of the dream came the end of my motivation, the end of my momentum. At the very peak of when the publishing company was beginning to grow, when my writing was starting to rise from the ashes, when I was coming to the realization of a great many things in my own life, divorce cut out my legs from under me and sent me to a pit of despair and inaction.

It’s taken weeks, months – heck, even years, to bring me to my senses about a very simple, yet powerful, fact: God’s promise doesn’t change because someone walks away from it. God’s promise cannot be broken. God’s plans for us are too great for us to do anything to thwart them.

I’ve been trying to pick these pieces up off the floor – cutting my fingers in the process, trying to put back that which is impossible to restore myself. When all the time, on the counter to my left, has been the same promise, restored, tailor-made for me.

God is good. And He is so good that He wouldn’t allow
something as destructive as divorce to finish me – or His promises – off.

And it’s through this process of learning who I am in Christ
– a conqueror who is loved by the Almighty – that I realize that for the last
couple years, I’ve been duped into thinking there is nothing I could do to move
forward, that life just had to happen to me.

But now I know. I know that instead of crawling on the
floor, all I have to do is stand up and walk. Instead of feeling sorry for
myself, all I have to do is look to God’s perfect plan in all things – the good
and the bad. Instead of getting frustrated when my plans fall apart because
life happens, all I have to do is take the reins and say, “Not today!”

I can steer the ship, instead of allowing the waves to carry me where they will. I can be intentional about each and every day. I can say no. I can say yes. I can carve out time to finish the projects, I can form the structure that was once destroyed but is now restored. I can take control of my procrastination, my nonchalant attitude, and I can march forward with the determination that I started this journey with.

With the intention that I started this journey with.