Live where you are planted.
That was my takeaway from a Bible study called Stepping Up that I started almost 12 years ago. It actually took me almost four years just to finish the study! When I first started it, Cody was a few weeks old and I didn’t get very far – shocking, I know. But one of the things I underlined was “The psalmist meant that he was a long way from home and from where he wished to be – that he felt like an alien. Can you relate?”
YES! I could relate. We lived among mostly families with much older children than Cody and didn’t have any close friends in our own town. Within two years, we decided to move to my hometown to at least be near family…a decision we tried to make a reality for another two years until we finally accepted it just wasn’t going to happen.
I started the Bible study again, randomly it seemed, and wrote words of the same theme:
“I am living in the wrong place.”
Yet within a few months, I wrote,
“I am where God wants me. He wants to prosper me here. My part is to live and serve where He has put me.”
Fast forward almost eight years and “Live where you are planted” has regularly popped into my head, not as a reminder of what to do but as I’ve seen the outcome of choosing to live that way.