WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

by Ann Voskamp

I just need the script running in my head to say I’m wanted, that I won’t be abandoned, that I’m somehow seen and known and safe.

Water drums in the empty shower. We may think we know what we want, but what we really want is to be known. Heard. Seen. Safe. My disillusion spills soundlessly all over the floor. How do you hope to find a way out of all that’s going wrong in your one and only life? Everyone’s just trying to find their own way, to their own dream come true. The dream isn’t ever truly about experiencing miraculous things, but about the experience of feeling miraculously known.

Detours are the way dreams and destinies actually come true.

“Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). It’s God’s first recorded question in all of history, the shortest question of the entire Hebrew Bible, and it hasn’t stopped echoing across the topography of time. Only three words: Where are you? The most life-changing questions always are the shortest. In Hebrew it’s actually only one word: ayekah. That one word God is speaking into this moment, even right now: “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” Where are you going with your life? Where is your soul on the way? Where you are—is this truly where you want to be?

God isn’t asking for Adam’s or anyone’s coordinates—He’s asking me to seek out and coordinate my own heart with His. The disappointments and disillusions, the dreams and desperate hopes, these are already known to an all-knowing God. He asks you where you are in your life because He wants you to name the place, see the place, acknowledge it, sit with it—even befriend it.

When we find the courage to be transparent, we find ourselves found. Only when you ask where you are every day can you find your way. The God who asks where you are, He’s large enough to hold you—however, wherever, you are. Where in the world am I really? Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! (Psalm 139:23–24 ESV)

The triune God isn’t disappointed in you, isn’t rebuking you, isn’t rejecting you, but the triune God delights in you, smiles over you, seeks to be with you, revives you with His kiss of grace and can’t stop singing love songs because of you. God knows that it always takes three to make the realest love out of anything, never only two. In the space between two people, only God can make a love that transcends the disappointments. The way that God wants the most is the way that keeps us close to Him. Right from the beginning, God has ached over any space and distance between us. When we were looking for a way out, God’s woe over any distance between us drove Him to make a way to us. To be with us.

Sometimes, just because you don’t feel chosen doesn’t mean that you aren’t chosen. All feelings are not facts, but all emotion is the language of the soul’s motion, the language of the pilgrim, the language of the soul’s movement toward God. God, though, these feelings feel like I’m dying inside.

How in the world can God be good and actually love me when He isn’t writing this story in a way that makes any sense, in a way that feels like He’s chosen me? And who can’t say that for a thousand different things? Are we truly chosen if our heart feels broken?

We want things to go the way we choose—and God wants us to choose to trust His ways. We expect more—and God expects us to trust Him more. The ways God chooses for His chosen are ways that beg us to choose trust. It’s impossible for us to please God unless we trust God with the impossible (Hebrews 11:6). There is no pleasing God without trusting God. Trusting God is no small thing: To God, it is everything. God wants to be chosen too.

God chooses to love you simply because He chooses you to love, God wants to be with you because He wants to be with you, He hesed-loves you because He hesed-loves you, and this is the perfect circular logic of Love. You are captivating to the point that God bound Himself to you, making His heart captive to yours to liberate you from every lie that you are forsaken.

Expect nothing but expect hesed. Expect God to knock at your door, expect God to rise on your horizon, expect hope and mercy and miracles and a glass of cold water, but just don’t expect God to come looking any way you expect. Expect nothing but hesed, the lovingkindness of God—just not in the kinds of ways you’d ever dreamed. Pain will come, but name it a mystery, and find manna in it, and taste bits of miracle even in what you can hardly stand and don’t understand.

If God chooses to attach Himself to your soul, what can anyone say, or do, to shame you, to detach you from Love Himself? If God has covenanted lovingkindness to you, what crisis or catastrophe can ever break that kind of chosenness? “Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing [hesed-love] for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the LORD, who has compassion on you. (Isaiah 54:10)

God is love, but if we get it turned around, and make being loved into our god, we get lost in self. Death of self is always the pulse that keeps love alive.

This is how to make love out of a marriage: Love lays down its own wants to lift up the will of another.

Suffering is part of any road that any heart’s ever known, and trying to avoid suffering at all costs is what causes all kinds of unnecessary suffering. Whatever the story or form of suffering, it can be transformed into a restoration story. Suffering always happens on the way, and there is always a way through and out of the suffering because the Way Himself is with you, hand in yours, guiding you.

It is deceptively easy to think life is simply about knowing and going the right way. That isn’t the whole of reality, nor is it particularly wise. Life is not only about activity, but also about receptivity. Simply let God lead you on, let God love you now, let God make the way, let God’s mind be your mind, let God’s Word be your heart, let God’s Way be your way. Life is letting. Come let Me love you.

Prayer isn’t about moving heaven to do things our way but about moving us to do things God’s way on earth. It’s being prayed at all times, even in this very moment, a chorus rising from this spinning earth: Our Father who art in heaven, Your kingdom come. Wasn’t it N. T. Wright who said that “‘Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’ . . . remains one of the most powerful and revolutionary sentences we can ever say”?1 It’s revolutionary to pray “Thy kingdom come” because it’s turning the soul from the clutches of our kingdom to the totality of God’s kingdom. Pray and turn the pages open, turn the palm up, turn and surrender to the King who is kin. The truly wise want more than their dreams to come true; they want God’s kingdom to truly come. There’s no praying “Thy kingdom come” until you’re living out “my kingdom’s done.”

I’m fool enough to believe: The best place to let your broken heart spill is always at the feet of Abba Father.

Waiting is a letting go to let something grow. The waiting need not destroy the soul but grow the soul. Waiting is a kind of expecting—expecting to have the capacity for hope and pain and love and life to expand.

Prayer isn’t giving God information to act upon but God giving us intimacy to rest in.