If your story looks different than you imagined

When My Dreams Didn’t Match God’s Plan

I never imagined I would become a Hope Mom. I know pregnancy books mention loss somewhere in the fine print, but it always felt distant to me. I didn’t know anyone in my real life who had lost a baby, and it seemed like the kind of thing that happened to other people, not something that would ever touch my story.

My first pregnancy ended early, with a tiny two-pound, ten-ounce baby boy born eleven weeks too soon. The months that followed were filled with alarms, monitors, and long days in the NICU, but he lived. He came home, he grew, and by the time he was three, he was happy and healthy, and life felt steady again. So when I walked into my doctor’s appointment in the summer of 2010, pregnant with my second baby, I felt confident and unaware that anything could be wrong.

I didn’t know that day would change everything.

When I learned that my daughter no longer had a heartbeat, it wasn’t just my heart that broke. It was the picture I had carried in my mind, the sense of safety I didn’t even realize I was holding, and the belief that if I trusted God and did everything “right,” the story would unfold the way I expected. Grief dismantled all of those assumptions in an instant.

In the weeks that followed, I clung to the Lord because I didn’t know where else to go. I spent a lot of time in Scripture, a lot of time crying, and a lot of time sitting with questions that didn’t have neat answers. I believed that God was good and I trusted that He would carry me through the valley of loss. But beneath the prayers I spoke out loud, another question quietly took root in my heart. What if the life I imagined didn’t look like the life God was writing?

I had never pictured myself here, and my faith in that season felt dry. I was learning how to hold belief and disappointment at the same time, and some days it felt like God was asking more of me than I had the strength to give. I remember thinking, This is not the story I hoped for.

What steadied me wasn’t clarity, but presence. Scripture didn’t give me explanations for why this happened, but it reminded me that I was not walking alone. “Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand” (Psalm 73:23). That verse became my anchor, not because it answered my questions, but because it reminded me that God was still holding on, even when everything felt uncertain. He promised to be with me, and that had to be enough.

That truth steadied my heart, even as I continued to search for answers. And there were so many questions I didn’t know how to answer. How do you trust God when the future looks nothing like you imagined? How do you keep moving forward when your heart is still grieving, and the path ahead feels unclear?

Over time, I learned that trusting God didn’t mean understanding His plan. It meant letting Him be my portion when nothing else made sense. “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26). I learned this not in theory, but in the real, aching moments of that season. 

There are scenes I can still picture clearly, like sitting in a quiet room as a second ultrasound confirmed what the first had already shown us, and crying out to God while knowing He had the power to do things differently. And when the pains of labor felt so small compared to the pain of my heart breaking as I held that sweet, 14-ounce, 10-inch girl whose own heart was no longer beating. And when her body grew cold the longer I held her, no matter how tightly I wrapped that pink quilt around her.

In my own crying out to God during those early days of my grief, I found myself drawn to the way Scripture describes Jesus in His suffering. When Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before He was crucified, Scripture tells us He prayed with loud cries and tears before surrendering to the Father’s will (Hebrews 5:7), and that matters to me. It tells me that surrender doesn’t require silence or pretending the pain isn’t real, but instead makes room for grief, honesty, and a deep longing for things to be different. (Matthew 26:39, Luke 22:41-42) 

Surrender, for me, didn’t mean letting go of my dreams as if they never mattered. It meant placing them, broken and unfinished, into the hands of a God who sees me fully and loves me deeply. Even now, years later, my heart still aches for the daughter I can’t hold. That ache hasn’t disappeared, but I’ve learned that God doesn’t waste it. He meets me there, draws me closer through it, and continues to invite me to trust Him, even when the story looks different than I once imagined. “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

If you’re holding dreams that didn’t come true, please remember that trusting God’s plan doesn’t mean erasing your longing or pretending the ache isn’t there. Sometimes it simply means letting disappointment rest alongside faith, trusting that God is still at work in ways we can’t yet see. And I believe that one day our stories will be gathered up and redeemed in ways we can’t yet imagine. Until then, we walk forward with open hands, trusting that God is still holding us, even when the story looks nothing like we hoped it would.

Because He lives, I hope,
Jennie Parks
Executive Director

Jennie is the Executive Director for Hope Mommies. She and her husband Brian live in Oregon and have four children together— Trenton, Paige who has been in Heaven with Jesus since 2010, Mason, and Cora. If you were to knock on her front door today, you’d find her in something comfortable drinking a hot cup of tea, while trying to figure out how to balance all the things that make up a life. She enjoys spending time in God’s word, fresh flowers, board games with her kids, cooking, and evening walks in her neighborhood. She adores being a new creation in Christ and prays she reflects Him well on this earth.