Very few of us get to write our own stories. We would like to, wouldn't we? We'd like to have a plan for where we will live, how we will work, how we'll meet a spouse and get married. How many children, what ages, temperaments, and personality quirks. Walking with our families through the aging process. And so on.

That actually works out for some people. But not many... And the rest of us get to deal with a ton of uncertainty. We get to see how our bodies and minds react to the positions of life we find ourselves in. Those positions can certainly change, too - much too quickly for some of us, or much too slowly.

Let me tell you a story about a young man (let's call him... me) who wanted to write his own story in life. In my mid-teen years, I started to get the picture that real life was about following after God and submitting to him. As I went to college, that looked like doing a lot of various ministries, reading my Bible, praying, and hanging out with others who did the same. I constructed a story line at that point: seminary next, then being a pastor. I would be on fire, a dynamic sharer of the gospel who knew how to relate the good news to every part of life. Having a family worked in there somewhere in my mind, though I had no idea how it would happen.

How many of us, in our youth, wanted to set the world on fire for Jesus? And how many of us fought to maintain the ascent on that path, come hell or high water? I saw things around me that colored my vision. I saw men in school who were practically ignoring their families. I saw people getting hurt by a lack of wisdom in church leadership. And I saw my own proclivities and the ways in which seeking status and position can highlight a deficiency in my own soul. Then I had to ask myself, do I sacrifice everything on the altar of following my plan?

Most of my story didn't happen. That's a good thing - it's what submission is about, that we daily turn our lives over to God, to be led where he wants us to go. But then we look up one day, having faithfully followed God down this path, only to realize just how far away we are from the story we would have written. Not just a first-pass edit - this is a gut-job rewrite. That becomes disillusionment, and a grieving process is a normal result.

Part of the coming-of-age process is realizing just how much of our lives is outside of our control - and realizing that life might never match our innermost desires (at least, unless those desires change). We do make choices that determine life's course, thinking we know the stakes. Then years later, we understand: the cross we bear now no longer looks like the one we chose to pick up. And depending on how we are built, that difference is precisely where the fog rolls on in and clouds everything for us.

We may come out of one trying season thinking, now is our time for rest and respite before we go on to the next stage - only to immediately enter a fresh time of difficulty. We thought we were in harmony with God when we started down a path. Now, in some level of exhaustion, we look around. We see just how far between two countries we are in our experience.

We wanted to write our own stories, and gave that up to walk closer with God - but we still sometimes desire that fleeting peace from seeing our own story fulfilled. We also do not feel the lasting peace that was supposed to come with following the Prince of Peace. It's not that we've left God's will - but we feel inner needs that are not being met.

A life submitted to God's will may well be a life lived in obscure mediocrity. But even in faithful submission, the underlying assumption can still doggedly persist that at some point in life we know the story. That we know how this will turn out, what the next steps are, and why we're going to take them. The pride is still there, deeply rooted in what Paul calls the flesh or old man, waiting to again be invited to the writer's room.

We still want to be able to write that script. When we still can't, we can do the easy thing and call to the carpet everything that's happening to us. Or, we can do the harder thing and turn inward. Then the fog swirls in, because we have things broken inside of us that just will not heal.

All of that is normal. Not feeling excitement or warmth or peace doesn't mean we've missed God's will. We can (and should) explore all of these to understand them better and have more awareness of how these felt needs drive us. But none of them surprise God, worry Him, or make Him think it's time to switch to plan B.

God knows our weakness and welcomes the soul that simply submits life to him. The one truth we have is the word of God that says, "Behold, I make all things new." Some day that will become very real to us, though it is true even today. The core discipline in the fog is practicing that submission when we cannot see - and often cannot feel either.

Whether God provides a mountaintop or keeps us hidden somewhere in a fog-ridden valley, we give him our life's steps, knowing that all will be healed in the end.

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• Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash