God Has Better Plans
There is a particular kind of darkness that comes when your professional life fractures without warning. It’s not a slow change you can see coming, but a sudden crack, the kind that makes you question everything you thought you knew about yourself, your worth, and your place in the world.
I have been in that darkness. If you are reading this, there is a chance you have been there too or you are there right now.This is not a story about what happened to me. It’s about what I learned in that season about anxiety, faith, and surrender.
Anxiety is a liar with excellent timing. It waits for the moment when something genuinely goes wrong and then it takes that real thing and builds a cathedral of fear around it. It whispers that the worst-case scenario is the only scenario. It tells you that you are failing, that everyone can see it, and that this is not a chapter, but the end.
If you live with anxiety, as many of us do, you know the difference between worry and the kind of dread that rewires your thinking. Some of us manage it with professional support, with therapy, with medication, or with exercise and routine. These are wise and necessary tools and there is no shame in any of them. God made us body, mind, and spirit, and caring for all three is the responsible thing to do.
Nevertheless, here is what I have learned: the tools that manage anxiety are not the same as the truth that answers it. Medication can quiet the noise, and a good therapist can help you see the patterns, but when you are lying awake at 2 a.m. and anxiety is telling you that your life is falling apart, only one voice has the authority to say otherwise – God’s.
In the middle of the most difficult professional season of my life, I chose to pray the hardest prayer there is. Not “God, fix this.” Not “God, give me a way out.” I simply prayed: “God, I surrender this to You.”
Surrender is the most counterintuitive act of faith. Everything in our professional training tells us to take control, to strategize, to drive the outcome. While there is a time for all of that, there comes a moment in certain seasons when your own effort has reached its limit, and the only honest thing left to do is open your hands and let go.
Surrender does not mean passivity. I still showed up. I still did my work with excellence. I still held my head up in rooms where it would have been easier to shrink. What I also did, though, was stop white-knuckling the outcome. I stopped demanding that the situation be resolved on my timeline. I even stopped trying to write the ending myself. With my surrender, something shifted, not in the circumstances and not right away, but within me.
There is a saying that when God closes a door, He opens a window. What nobody tells you is that the hallway between the two is its own kind of hell. You cannot see what is ahead. The door behind you is locked. Anxiety stands right beside you, narrating every possible disaster, telling you that the hallway is your destination; but faith tells you it’s just a passage.
I spent months in that hallway…. months of not knowing… months of choosing, daily and imperfectly, to trust that the God who had carried me through every other season was not going to abandon me in this one.
Faith in the hallway is not confident. It is not the bold worship of a Sunday morning. It is the quiet, teeth-clenched trust of a Tuesday night when nothing has changed and you choose to believe anyway. It is surrendering again and again, because surrender is not a one-time act. It is a daily discipline.
I will tell you how the story ends, not because my story is special but because it follows a pattern I have seen over and over in the lives of people who surrender their seasons to God. The ending God wrote was not the one I wanted. It was better.
An opportunity emerged that did not exist when my crisis began. A door I could not have known about, which led to an outcome that I could not have dreamed of, came because God was working in the background of my story
Looking back, I can see it clearly: the season that felt like destruction was actually redirection. Though my surrender was not easy or painless, it enabled me to trust in God even though I couldn’t see what He was doing and it allowed me to say ‘no” to my anxiety. My surrender let God finish what He started and if He did it for me, He can do it for you too.
Maria Eugenia grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, raised in a Catholic family of three sisters and one brother. She currently lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, with Alex, her husband of 24 years, and their French Bulldog RoRo. They have twin sons, 21 years old, Carlos and Luis, who are about to graduate from the University of Wisconsin and Boston University respectively. Maria Eugenia and Alex are active servers of Build the Faith, and practice their faith with the support and inspiration of a close group of friends, and guided by the example and legacy of Christina Dangond and her family.
