The Best Things Were Never Planned
[Sitting at a café in Dubai Mall]
You cannot earn a gift; you cannot expect a gift; therefore a true gift must be unearned and unexpected.
The moment you earn it… it stops being a gift. It becomes something like compensation. And perhaps the purest gifts cannot be fully expected either. Because the moment you expect it… it stops being a gift. It becomes something you were simply waiting on.
So based on my premise a real gift, by it’s very nature, carries two qualities:
It is unearned.
And unexpected.
Where you are in life right now may be more of a gift than you realize. Your life is not an accident. You are not an accident. God has not misplaced you, even in seasons when it feels as though your life has wandered far from the original plan. God has not made a mistake.
Now you may not have expected to be here.
You may not have chosen this version of the story.
But when you look back honestly, how much of your life actually happened according to plan? The jobs you found. The friendships you formed. The obstacles you overcame. The rooms you entered. Even some of your greatest victories arrived in ways you could not have predicted and, truthfully, could never have earned entirely on your own. The very things you thought made your life uncertain… that unpredictability and its lack of explanation… may be the same things that reveal it as a gift.
If you take a look over your life and be honest, most of it was a surprise.
Even you were a surprise.
I know we like to pretend we knew exactly what we were doing. We take credit for the outcome, organize the story into neat steps and even sometimes attempt to teach other people the formula… as though we had a framework from the beginning.
But the truth is, most of it surprised us.
That is the evidence that it was a gift.
Because the unplanned thing is the only kind of thing a gift has ever been.
Consider how creation actually works.
No one plans for the wildflowers to end up on the side of the road. They simply... appear there. Growing in a ditch nobody was tending, in places no gardener hand selected, and somehow those wildflowers become more beautiful than the carefully arranged garden down the street.
The most beautiful things in this world were almost never on the schedule.
The sunset. The rain that came when it was not in the forecast. The seed the wind carried somewhere no one intended... that later became a tree people would sit under for shade.
Nothing in nature earns the right to exist. The lily does not toil for its beauty. The bird does not audition for the sky. And yet the whole earth is covered, every single spring, in gifts nobody planned and nobody paid for.
You are part of that same creation.
I want to say this again, you cannot pay for a gift.
The moment you try... you insult it. You turn someone’s generosity into a transaction. You hand back the very thing that made it beautiful.
It is possible that all the years you spent trying to earn your place here… all the accomplishments you collected to prove that your existence was justified… were not expressions of gratitude. Perhaps they were a quiet refusal to receive what had already been given.
Look at your life. The real shape of it.
Most of its best parts were never planned. The person you did not expect to love. The turn you did not choose that put you at the right place at the right time. The door that closed and sent you somewhere better than the place you were trying to reach. The child, the calling, the friendship, the second chance...
They arrived off schedule.
Unearned.
And yet you keep calling those things detours.
But what if they were deliveries?
What if the unplanned shape of your life is not proof that something went wrong... but proof that you have been receiving gifts the entire time? Most of them were the ones you never would have thought to ask for.
The unexpected may have been one of the most generous forces in your life. You just kept mistaking it for a mistake.
Here is the whole point of this letter:
Where you are in life right now is not necessarily an accident that must be corrected or a problem that must be fixed.
It may be a gift.
Not because every moment has been easy. Not because every loss was fair. But because even inside this unplanned part of life… something is still being given to you. A new way of seeing things. A deeper capacity to love. A strength revealed you did not know you possessed. A life you could not have designed, but one that may still contain more beauty than the life you originally imagined.
The best things were never planned.
They were received. Soften your heart a little and take a deep breathe and receive the gift of where you are right now in life.
I’ll write you next Sunday.
Gold,