Have I Missed God's Plan for My Life?
“What if God has been preparing you all along?"
- Annemarie Cross
There are seasons of life that can leave us wondering whether we've somehow missed what God intended for us. Yet when we look again at the experiences, detours and unexpected chapters we've lived, we may begin to recognise something we couldn't see at the time: preparation can be taking place long before we recognise what we are being prepared for.
Perhaps you've looked back over your life and wondered:
Have I missed God's plan for my life?
Maybe life looks very different from what you once imagined.
There may have been opportunities that didn't eventuate. Decisions you would make differently now. Years that seem disconnected from where you find yourself today.
Perhaps disappointment, betrayal, loss, illness or circumstances outside your control changed the direction you thought your life would take.
And when enough time has passed, another question can begin to surface:
Was that time wasted — or could God have been preparing something I couldn't yet recognise?
When the path doesn't look like the plan
We often recognise purpose more easily when we can see progression.
One experience leads naturally to another. A door opens. Something we've been working towards begins to take shape. We can see where we're going and understand how the pieces fit together.
But many lives don't unfold that neatly.
There are interruptions. Unexpected endings. Long seasons when seemingly very little is happening.
There are paths we thought we would take but didn't. Skills we acquired for one reason that eventually became useful for something entirely different. Relationships, experiences and even difficult seasons that shaped capacities in us we wouldn't recognise until years later.
When we're standing in the middle of those seasons, they can appear disconnected.
Looking backwards, however, sometimes a pattern begins to emerge.
What once looked like a collection of disconnected experiences can look very different when viewed through the lens of preparation.
Joseph couldn't see the whole pattern either
Joseph's story gives us an extraordinary picture of this.
As a young man, Joseph received dreams that pointed towards something significant in his future.
Yet what followed hardly looked like movement towards their fulfilment.
He was betrayed by his brothers. Sold into slavery. Taken to Egypt. Falsely accused. Imprisoned.
And then, even after helping Pharaoh's cupbearer by interpreting his dream, Joseph remained forgotten in prison for another two years.
If we separated those chapters from the rest of Joseph's story, we could easily describe them as interruption, injustice and delay.
Yet something else was happening within them.
In Potiphar's household, Joseph was entrusted with responsibility.
In prison, responsibility found him again.
He learned to steward what was placed in his hands even when his circumstances bore little resemblance to the future he had once seen.
And eventually, when Pharaoh needed someone with wisdom and discernment who could oversee Egypt during years of abundance and famine, Joseph wasn't stepping into responsibility for the first time.
He had been practising stewardship in places that didn't look anything like the palace.
Only later could the significance of those earlier chapters be recognised.
Joseph eventually told his brothers:
“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” — Genesis 50:20
Joseph wasn't calling evil good.
His brothers' betrayal was still betrayal.
The injustice was still injustice.
But neither betrayal nor injustice had the final word over what God could accomplish.
Preparation doesn't always announce itself as preparation.
Sometimes we recognise it only when a later assignment reveals why certain capacities were being formed.
I can see this in my own story
There are parts of my own life that make far more sense looking backwards than they ever did while I was living them.
When I was younger, I thought I would become a teacher.
Then a horse-riding accident left me with a concussion, and the direction I thought my life would take changed.
Instead of following the path I had imagined, I found myself working in office environments and eventually building experience across areas that, at the time, simply seemed like the next job, the next responsibility or the next stage of life.
Years later, I discovered coaching.
And something began to make sense.
Skills, experiences and ways of seeing people that had developed through seemingly unrelated chapters suddenly had somewhere to belong.
The teaching hadn't disappeared either.
It simply expressed itself differently from what I had once imagined.
Over the years, coaching, mentoring, speaking, podcasting, interviewing, developing frameworks and helping people recognise what they carry have become deeply interconnected parts of my work.
I couldn't have mapped that journey at the beginning.
But looking backwards, I can recognise threads of preparation that I couldn't recognise while I was living them.
And perhaps there are threads in your story too.
LOOK AGAIN
Think about an experience in your life that you've considered a detour.
What did that season develop in you?
Perhaps it was a skill.
Discernment.
Compassion for a particular group of people.
An ability to communicate something others struggle to articulate.
Wisdom you could only have gained by walking through something yourself.
A sensitivity to an issue you now find difficult to ignore.
A capacity to lead, organise, create, teach, encourage, advocate, restore or build.
Before deciding a chapter was wasted, look again at what was formed there.
What if some of the evidence is already present?
When we're asking God about purpose or calling, it's easy to look primarily towards the future.
What am I meant to do?
Where is God leading me?
What is my purpose?
But another valuable place to look is behind us.
Not because the past determines our future, but because our history can contain evidence of formation.
Paul writes:
“For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” — Ephesians 2:10
There is intentionality in those words.
Created. Prepared. Works prepared in advance. And that invites a different kind of enquiry.
What has God entrusted to you?
What themes have continued to surface throughout your life?
What do people repeatedly seek your help with?
What have you learned to recognise that others may overlook?
What burdens your heart in a way that seems to persist?
What truth have you lived deeply enough that you could now help another person walk through it?
These aren't formulas for discovering God's will.
They're places worthy of attention.
Because sometimes what we're asking God to reveal has already left fingerprints throughout our story.
Recognition can change the way we interpret what we've lived through.
Hurt can make us discount what we carry
There is another reason this matters.
Sometimes the difficulty isn't that there is nothing to recognise.
It's that something happened that caused us to stop valuing it.
Perhaps you spoke and were silenced.
You trusted someone and were betrayed.
You stepped forward and were criticised.
Something you built failed.
A relationship ended.
A church experience wounded you.
Or circumstances changed so dramatically that what once seemed clear became difficult to trust.
Pain can influence the meaning we assign to our experiences.
We can begin calling something insignificant because someone else didn't value it.
We can assume a gift disappeared because there was a season when we weren't using it.
We can interpret hiddenness as evidence that we've been forgotten.
Yet a season in which something wasn't visible isn't necessarily evidence that it wasn't being formed.
There are times when what God is doing within us may become visible only much later.
Perhaps the question is bigger than “Did I miss it?”
“Have I missed God's plan for my life?” can carry enormous weight.
It places our attention on the possibility of one wrong decision, one lost opportunity or one unexpected chapter having somehow placed us permanently outside what God can do.
But Scripture repeatedly shows us people whose stories contain disruption, failure, waiting, wilderness, opposition and unexpected turns.
Moses spent decades in Midian before returning to Egypt.
David was anointed king and then returned to ordinary life before eventually stepping into the throne.
Peter denied Jesus and later became one of the most significant voices in the early Church.
Paul's life changed direction dramatically on the road to Damascus.
Their stories weren't tidy.
Neither are ours.
Perhaps, then, there is another question worth bringing before the Lord:
Father, what are You inviting me to recognise about the life I have already lived?
That question turns our attention away from trying to reconstruct an imaginary perfect path and towards recognising what may already have been formed, entrusted and prepared.
What might you recognise now?
Before moving on from this article, take a few minutes with these questions.
1. Where can you now see preparation you couldn't recognise at the time?
Think about seasons that made little sense while you were living them.
What became useful later?
2. What has been formed in you through what you've lived?
Consider skills, wisdom, resilience, discernment, compassion, knowledge and lived experience.
What do you carry today that you didn't carry before?
3. What have you dismissed that may deserve another look?
Perhaps there is an experience, ability, idea, burden or recurring theme you've considered too ordinary or insignificant to matter.
Bring it before the Lord again.
Not everything in our past will become part of a future assignment.
But some things may carry more significance than we first recognised.
Your story may contain clues you haven't noticed yet
There are chapters of our lives whose significance can only be understood later.
Sometimes an experience makes sense when another piece appears.
Sometimes a skill developed years earlier suddenly becomes necessary.
Sometimes the very place where we experienced pain gives us compassion and understanding for people we will one day serve.
And sometimes we discover that what looked like an interruption was also a place of formation.
That doesn't mean every painful experience was sent by God.
Nor does it mean every closed door was secretly something we should celebrate.
It means the Lord is not limited by the chapters we wish had unfolded differently.
He can redeem. He can restore. He can reveal.
And He can help us recognise what has been formed and entrusted through a life we may previously have misunderstood.
So perhaps the question isn't only:
“Have I missed God's plan?”
Perhaps another question is waiting to be asked:
“Father, what have You been preparing in me that I'm only now beginning to recognise?”
And then — look again.
There may be more to your story than you realised.
Continue exploring
If this question has been sitting quietly in your heart, you may also enjoy this episode of Cave to Calling, where I explore what it can mean when life hasn't unfolded as expected and how we can begin recognising the preparation that may have been taking place along the way.
Explore The Steward's Formation Roadmap
If this article has prompted you to look differently at what God has formed and entrusted through your story, The Steward's Formation Roadmap offers a deeper journey through Recognition, Preparation, Articulation, Expression and Stewardship.
