Life can be cruel and unforgiving at times. It’ll kick you when you’re down, make you think the worst is over with, and then come back with a vicious RKO. How do we keep our hopes up in a world filled with so much pain, suffering, and sorrow?

At some point or another, we will have something go wrong in our life. Whether it’s major or minor, our plan for our life never matches up with what actually unfolds. This is the nature of humanity, but we still have a hard time accepting that we cannot control what happens and we don’t have all the answers. I struggle with the fact that the events in my life never go according to how I planned them. For example, I told myself I would work hard for a 4.0 GPA my freshman year that way I could have some leeway for the rest of my college career. Boy, was that dream absolutely crushed.

So things don’t go the way we hoped they would, or some unexpected tragedy pops into our lives, but how do we handle it in the moment? I know from personal experience and experiences from people I am close with that our initial reaction is almost always panic. One ounce of adversity gets thrown into the mixing bowl and our entire cake of success and happiness is jeopardized completely. I get frustrated with myself that I react like this because the Bible tells us baker’s dozens of times that we need to trust God’s plan for our lives.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” (Proverbs 3:5-6)

This passage alone should tell us how to handle any curveball thrown at us in our life. First, trust in the Lord with all your heart. We tell ourselves a lot of the time that we do trust the Lord in all things, but if we are doing so, how can anxiety and doubt and fear be evident in any part of our lives? It is fine to be invested in what is happening to you because it is your life, but we need to have confidence that our God knows what He is doing and that “God works for the good of those who love Him” (Romans 8:28).

In the earlier passage from Proverbs, it says we must not lean on our own understanding, which can be especially difficult because our pride prevents us from doing so. Believing we know the best way of doing things or knowing what is more beneficial to our livelihood is not intelligence, it’s stubbornness.

We seem to push aside the fact that we do not have complete knowledge of our universe when we should really be submitting to God’s omnipotence. This is another form of trusting and having faith in God’s ability to work in your life, and if we as Christians can’t do this, do we legitimately believe?

When the going gets tough for me, I try to keep in mind what the Word tells me about resting in Him, and as a result, He will guide me to where I need to be. This way I can still have a plan for my life, but it is designed much better than I could ever hope for.