Saturday, January 23, 2010

I'm a Recovering Planner

So, just three days ago I returned from a life-changing trip to southern India. I went to work at an organization called Care India with a wonderful friend of mine and her father-in-law, who is a pastor and has worked with this mission organization for over 25 years. I'm still gathering and sorting through my thoughts. So many that I can barely sift them. I thought in an effort to begin my own decompression and debrief that I would share one of the lessons that I taught while there.

One of our assignments was to teach several sessions at a seminar for the wives and their friends of the pastors who work for Care India. One morning before we left for India while I was still struggling with what to say, God woke me up with these thoughts about my need to plan and his desire to break me of that need.

I've already thought of the many, many entries that will come as a result of this trip. I'm just having a hard time right now sorting it all out in my own mind. God certainly proved once again through this trip that He is still helping me overcome my dependence on my own ability to plan and refocusing my efforts on trusting in him. Enjoy reading this and hopefully you will be encouraged to see the own places and times in your life when God has shown you that his ways are not your ways.


My name is Laura Dingman and I’m a wife, mother of a beautiful 3-year old daughter, a musician, a worship leader, and most importantly, a daughter of the King of Kings. I’m also a planner—a person who likes order, likes to know what is coming, likes to plan what the days ahead look like. This trip to your country is a part of God undoing that desire to plan and control my life that is deep within me. But this trip has not been the beginning of God forcing me to trust Him instead of myself. It really has been a lifelong process.


When I was 10 years old, I decided that I wanted to be a teacher. I wasn’t sure what I was going to teach, but that was what I was going to do. I would play school in our neighbor’s basement all summer when most kids were playing ball outside trying to forget about school. As I grew up, that desire only grew. When I was fourteen, I had narrowed down the subject I would teach to math or music. As I finished school and had to decide on my college plans, I chose music.


I grew up in the church, knowing God, with a wonderful set of Christian parents who taught me the Bible and showed me the love of God. I had a foundation laid for me that would prove to be important throughout my life. What I don’t really remember was ever asking God what HE wanted me to do. I had just decided that I wanted to be a teacher and that I wanted to teach music.

So I went to college and afterward became a music teacher. I taught for 9 years and in the last two years of teaching, God began to call me into ministry. I was not happy about this at first. The first time I was asked by our music minister to come and work for the church, I said no. I enjoyed teaching and I just couldn’t see myself doing that. What I didn’t know at the time was that it wasn’t our music minister asking me that, it was God. I continued teaching another year.


During that year, I began to really struggle with teaching. It was a difficult year. My joy for teaching seemed to be gone. I can see now that God was trying to get my attention. Deuteronomy 30:19 says, “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” I was choosing my own way and not God’s. I was not choosing life.


In January of that year, my husband and I began to really pray about what God wanted me to do. This was the first time in my life when I completely surrendered and said, “God, whatever you want me to do. That is what I will do.” By March we were talking to our music minister about the possibility of me working in ministry at the church and by June I had quit teaching and started ministry.

I felt completely unworthy. I had been trained to teach. I knew about music and knew that teaching it was something that I could do. I knew about God and knew the Bible, but I didn’t know anything about ministry. I had been serving in the church, but this was different. I was trusting myself and not trusting God.


Proverbs 3:5-6 says “Trust in the Lord with ALL your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.” I was leaning on my own understanding, my own knowledge, my own training. God wanted me to lean on his. I trusted God, but not really for things that were within my control. That was when he began to take away that control and show His power in my life.


My first year in ministry, my husband, Matt, and I had been married for 6 years. We had been trying to get pregnant for a while with no success. In the summer of that year we went through some medical testing and discovered that we were not going to be able to get pregnant. We were devastated. Part of my plan was that we would have a family and I wasn’t sure how that was going to happen now.


Within the course a few weeks a woman who said she was trying to find adoptive parents for some babies who were in Russia approached us. She was from Russia and was an American citizen. We thought this was God’s answer to our prayers to have a family. We gave her money and met with her a couple of times. She gave us a photograph of the child who was to be our daughter and we named her Hannah Mikhayla. We continued to pray and to thank God for providing a way for us to have a family.


Over the next month, we were told various tales about when the baby would arrive. This went on and on until one morning the police knocked on our door. We discovered this woman had been lying to us about the babies so she could steal our money. She had intentionally harmed us and used our desire for a child for her own profit and gain. Again we were devastated. We just couldn’t see how God was going to give us a family.

Just like Genesis 50:20 says, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” Just as Joseph’s brothers intended to harm him, this woman had intended to harm us. But God had a plan to use our situation to open our hearts to something more. He had a different plan.

About 6 months after the adoption scam, we received a phone call from the father of a girl who had been one of my students. He called to tell us that his daughter was pregnant and that she had heard we were interested in adopting. She was young and couldn’t take care of the baby. She wanted us to be her child’s parents. We were very scared. Scared of being hurt again. Scared that our dream and desire to be parents would simply not ever be. But God kept reminding us of Proverbs 3:5-6.

We met with her and her father and talked, laughed, and cried. In June of that year, she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl who is now our wonderful daughter, Abigail.

We didn’t know what kind of healing God would send through this little girl. Her joy is unmatched. She is the kind of child who lights up a room. Even though she is not biologically ours, God knit her together. Just like He promises in Psalm 139:13-14. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

I am convinced that while he was knitting her together, he took pieces of me, of my husband, of her birthmother, Abby, and her birthfather and wove them into the beautiful, unmatched tapestry that is our Abigail Elizabeth.

Joanna Weaver, in her book “Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World” says, “What is it about us women that creates such a desperate need in us to always ‘know’ , to always ‘understand’? We want an itinerary for our life and when God doesn’t immediately produce one, we write our own. ‘I need to know’, we tell ourselves. ‘No’, God answers softly, ‘You need to trust.’” (p. 26) There is a reason the Bible tells us to “Be Still, to Cease Striving and know that he is God.” (Psalm 46:10)

There are so many pieces to our story that I had no control over—things that I could not plan. God has proved faithful over and over again. When I stop striving and start trusting, He pulls through in ways that I cannot imagine.


"For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,"
declares the LORD.

"As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,

so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.

Instead of the thornbush will grow the pine tree,
and instead of briers the myrtle will grow.
This will be for the LORD's renown,
for an everlasting sign,
which will not be destroyed."

Isaiah 55:8-13


God’s promises are true. When we trust, he works. When we obey, he comes through.

What “plans” have you made that you need to give over to God? How do you need to be trusting Him more?


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