Plans

I like to plan. It gives me a false sense that I have some level of control over what’s happening in my life. I tell myself that I plan to make sure everyone else has an enjoyable time, but I fear I am trying to avoid their criticism.

I am not alone in this love of planning. There are entire industries devoted to helping us plan. It’s hard to imagine what life was like before there were calendars. The Covid shutdown may have wiped them clean for a while, but I was eager to get back to planning things.

What I have learned, over time and through much frustration, is that I must make plans in pencil, preferably a pencil with a large eraser. This was certainly true while Nick was suffering through surgeries, chemo, and failing health. It has also been true this past fall. Awaiting the birth of twins, their arrival on Thanksgiving week, extended family coming and going with their own plans, surgeries and biopsies thrown in the mix, why bother owning a pen?

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such-and-such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. James 4:13-14

And now it’s the new year. 2023 – shouldn’t we have flying cars? Did you make a new year’s resolution? I will admit I stopped making them a long time ago. I eased into it by dubbing the upcoming year “the year of the house,” or “the year for travel.” But I found that I rarely knew in January what the upcoming year would hold. Last January, I didn’t know what a blog was. Last January, my daughter was not pregnant and lived in Fort Worth.

So I will make my plans in pencil. I hope to have a garden. I have been scheming on ways to enrich the soil, hinder weeds among the sugar snaps, frustrate the robber squirrels and chipmunks. I plan to continue this blog. Maybe I’ll have a better garden; hopefully I’m a better writer. God willing, I will have some new things to share. I’d like to spend some time at the beach, and much time at the lake. I plan to spend a lot of time with my grandchildren, and my children and my family and my friends. God willing.

Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” James 4:15

Because who besides God knows what the new year will bring? For the world, for our country, for my family, for me. As civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy famously said, ” I do not know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.”

That’s why I do not stress about not being able to plan in pen. It’s a little scary to be open to wherever the Lord may send my way. I make my plans, but I prepare myself for God changing them. I try to leave words like “never” and “always” out of my vocabulary. I keep telling myself that any relationship is more important than any plan I make. A hard lesson for those of us who like to plan. I remind myself that my plans need to be subject to His plans.

His plans are better than mine; better for the world, better for His kingdom, better for me.

And He is with us. No matter what happens. To the end of the age.

Now to Him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen. Ephesians 3:20-21

Happy New Year!

Betsy