Life doesn’t always go the way we planned, yet somehow, we have to trust the story anyway. It’s not always fun. It’s not always easy. Most times, it’s hard, but it’s the work of growing. It’s the work of evolving, and it’s the work of becoming better versions of ourselves.

Life is just chaos taking order. We draw a line between disconnected dots to connect and make some order out of the chaos. When you look back, you can see all the dots and how they’re all connected. But when you look forward, you just see all the dots, and they seem chaotic because you still don’t know how they’re all going to connect. You haven’t yet been able to make order out of the chaos. It’s just a lot of dots.

It’s kind of like the stars in the night sky. They seem like there’s no order to them. They look like they don’t make sense. There are no patterns. It’s just all these random stars in the sky. It wasn’t until an astrologer looked up to the skies and started to make order out of them, and began to find the patterns, and started to see this isn’t chaotic.

There’s some order. There’s some pattern, and astrologers created the constellations. The constellations are beautiful. It’s images drawn out of the stars in the sky.

But someone had to do that. Someone had to look at that chaos and figure out how to turn it into something beautiful.

All the dots of your past are like stars.

You see how they’re all connected. Maybe that’s as far as you’ve ever taken it. You’ve only ever seen how everything has connected.You haven’t learned to identify something greater out of them. We don’t know to look up to the night sky and look for Orion’s belt until someone teaches us to do that.

Sometimes we’re looking back and seeing how everything’s connected, but it still feels chaotic, or we’re looking back, and the way things have connected hasn’t been the way we wanted. When we look to the future and see all the chaos in the dots that aren’t connected yet, we panic because when we look back and see things haven’t worked out the way we wanted, or something didn’t go the way we planned, we worried the future would go the same way. When things haven’t gone the way you want, it’s hard to think they’ll go the way you want.

We’re trying to make a constellation.

For many years, my wife and I have been trying to start our family. It’s been three years of looking back and seeing how things have connected, but it hasn’t gone the way we wanted. It’s hard to know how things will connect or work out.

For many people, starting a family isn’t as complicated as it has been for my wife and me or for couples who experience infertility. We eventually went to an infertility specialist and ran all the tests, and our diagnosis was unexplained infertility. This is the least helpful diagnosis because if you don’t know what’s broken, you can’t fix it, and so you try to fix everything.

For multiple years, we’ve held out hope month after month after month. We have had to muster the courage to start this process all over again every month. Our hope is crushed over and over and over again.

Manufacturing hope repeatedly takes its toll. Expensive procedures take their toll. Insensitive comments from people take their toll. Watching other people’s families grow around us takes its toll.

This isn’t pretty. This is just honest. When life doesn’t go the way we planned, it typically doesn’t bring out the best in people. It tends to bring out all of the ugliness and parts we don’t want other people to see. When your story doesn’t go the way you plan it, it beats you down a bit. It hardens you. Sometimes we become bitter. We become angry, and we become cynical. That’s what happened to me. Those are three words that I would never use to describe myself, but they fit the bill lately.

Your internal ugliness might look different than mine. There’s nothing wrong with experiencing all of those negative emotions at a fundamental level. The challenge is that sometimes we end up getting stuck there. Rather than moving beyond those things, we let them become part of who we are. It becomes a version of ourselves.

I was becoming a bitter, angry, cynical person. We think it’s easier to stay there. So we do. But any time that things aren’t going the way we want, it’s an opportunity for growth. It’s an opportunity for self-evolution. It’s an opportunity for the ugliness to rise to a place where we have to deal with it.

I don’t want to be angry, bitter, and cynical all the time. I want to grow beyond it. And I would hope because you’re reading this that you would like to expand beyond whatever stirs within you – that ugliness that comes up within you when things don’t go your way.

Our story hasn’t gone the way we’ve planned, and maybe your story hasn’t gone the way you’ve planned.

Maybe looking forward is paralyzing because when you look back and see all those dots, they didn’t connect the way you planned. They didn’t connect the way you wanted. That’s terrifying.

I used to say that when you look back at your life, you’ll see how everything connects. Hindsight is 2020. You’ll see how everything that’s happened has connected to bring you to where you are. And it’s true, but it’s only a half-truth.

It’s a half-truth because people say those things with this underlying implied level of optimism. When you’re experiencing things that aren’t going the way you want, you’re usually not experiencing optimism.

That phrase, “everything works out,” is like saying that hindsight automatically equals peace. It doesn’t automatically equal peace.

Until you can look back and see the good in how everything connected and choose to see how everything has turned into a great constellation, you will stay stuck in whatever ugliness is in you.

You have to do the work of changing your past into something beautiful.

You have to turn the parts of your story that you’ve already lived into something worthwhile. If you don’t do that, you’re going to relive the same story repeatedly, and things are just never going to go the way you planned.

You’re never going to get to a place where you can trust the story that you’re living. Until astrologers looked at the chaotic night sky and found the patterns, it remained a mystery. As soon as they could see how things connected, and as soon as some of that unknown became known, they could use it and learn from it and understand things moving forward that they didn’t understand up to that point.

It’s the same thing for your story. You can look back and see the patterns, see how everything has connected in a very specific way, and turn all of that into something helpful for your future.

You have to do the work. Personal growth happens when you’re willing to see what’s always been there and turn it into something helpful.

That begs the question. If you can look back and find the order in the chaos and turn all of that into something helpful and give it meaning now, doesn’t that mean that you can do that in the future?

If you can do that in the future, doesn’t that mean you can do it before you live that future? If you’re going to look back ten years from now and choose to find how all of the dots (that you haven’t lived yet) are connected and give them meaning and purpose, can’t you do that proactively?

Can’t you go into these ten years with that purpose and meaning? Yes. The answer is yes.

If you can have it in the future, you can have it now. So take the purpose and meaning you’re waiting to live the next ten years to get to and bring it into the now.

When you look back, and you give something meaning, you’re trusting the story that you’ve already lived. You’re showing yourself that you can trust the story.

My wife and I will grow our family someday. I will look back and see how all of the dots in my life have connected. And I will be able to create some incredible constellations out of them because I do trust the story that I’m living.

Don’t retroactively do the work. Trust the story as it evolves.

What I’m trying to do, and encourage you to do, is don’t wait to look back and retroactively apply the meaning and purpose to what you’ve lived. Preemptively apply those things because you’re going to live it one way or another. You’re going to go through everything you’re going to go through, but you do get to decide how you go through it.

Trusting the story is an incredible act of faith. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to get bruised, hurt, or beaten down. It doesn’t mean that because you’re choosing to apply meaning and finding the good in the hard times, that the hard times don’t come.

I think trusting the story is about getting back up, and although you can’t see how your dots are connecting at the moment, trusting that they are.

Let’s be clear; trusting the story is not pretending everything is okay. It’s not pretending everything is fine. It truly is about acknowledging the hard things that exist and making space for them. But then choosing that something beautiful will come out of those hard times. Choosing that when all of your dots do connect, it’s turned into an incredible constellation.

Trusting the story is not an excuse to shut down, abandon your life, or hide. It’s the opposite. We don’t shut down anymore because we know that what appears chaotic is just chaos coming into order.

You can’t choose to apply meaning to something or see the good in something or trust your story if you’re not present, or if you’re not in the story, or if you’re hiding from the story, or you’re abandoning the story, or you’re shutting down.

Trusting the story is saying, “Yes, this is happening. I accept it’s happening, but I also choose to grow and evolve as a human because this is happening.”

You want to be better because of what’s happening, not worse.

I’m learning how to do this. I’m learning how to trust the story in my own life.

I am trying to see how things in my life have connected and find the beautiful constellations within that. And some days it’s easy, and some days it’s hard. Some days I’m better at it than others.

It’s not a once-and-done thing. We have to keep finding the meaning and keep finding the good. On the days when our hope is crushed, those are the hard days. Those are the hard days to look back and see anything good, but it’s still there. And I’m still trying.

I’m trying to see how the journey my wife and I are on to start our family has brought us closer together, has made us stronger, and has made us more resilient. Those are all things that I can take into my future.

Life does not always go the way we planned, but we must learn to trust the story anyway.

I hope you can look back and see how all the dots in your life have connected. I hope you can start to find the constellations within that. I hope you can turn those constellations into helpful things that equip you to handle the hard times in the future, even better than you have in the past.

You know that life is happening regardless of whether it goes the way we plan or want, and we have to show up anyway. So let’s show up. Let’s grow. Let’s evolve, and let’s trust the story.