It’s not supposed to be this way

I keep thinking about Abraham, standing under a sky God once told him would be full of sons, yet feeling the heaviness of a man who only held silence in his arms.

I imagine the tremor in his voice when he said, “Lord… what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless?”

As if to whisper the wound beneath the words:

“It’s not supposed to be this way.”

And God heard the part Abraham didn’t say out loud.

I feel that same ache.

The same contradiction: faith in one hand, disappointment in the other.

I find myself staring at the pieces of what I thought would be, looking at the life I planned

and the life I’m holding

and wondering how the two ended up so far apart.

I whisper it too, in the dark, when no one else can hear: “Lord… is this really what I’m supposed to leave behind?

Is this really how the story goes?

Is this the inheritance of my days,

an empty place where my heart thought You would fill?”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Not according to my understanding.

Not according to the promises I thought I comprehended.

Not according to the timeline I tried to build my hope on.

But grief has a strange way of pushing me into honesty, the kind that lays me bare before God,

the kind that shakes loose the fragile scripts

I have been clinging to.

Because here is the truth I’m learning in the unraveling: God is not threatened by my disappointment.

He is not startled by the tremble in my questions.

He does not cringe when my faith looks more like a bruise than a banner.

He meets me here, in the place where I say,

“This doesn’t look like what You said,”

and He answers,

“Neither did it for Abraham… but I was writing something bigger than he could see.”

And maybe He is doing the same in me.

Maybe the places that feel empty

are the very ground where promise is learning to breathe.

Maybe the unanswered places

are where God is planting what will bloom in a season I haven’t stepped into yet.

Maybe the ache is not evidence of abandonment but the first contraction of something heaven

sent.

Abraham didn’t see stars in his hands yet,

but God still told him to look up.

And I think that’s what the Lord is whispering to my grief tonight:

“Lift your eyes.

I am not done.

This is not the end of your story.

You are not handing your life to emptiness.

What feels withheld is being prepared.

What feels delayed is being delivered.

What feels impossible is already forming in My hands.”

So here I am—

It wasn’t supposed to be this way…

but it also won’t stay this way.

Because the God who met Abraham in the ache

is still the God who meets me in mine.

And if He could draw a nation out of a barren place, He can draw beauty out of this too.