On Plans and Why I Shouldn't Make Them

You really can't plan your life. To everyone out there who's currently working a plan, dreaming up a plan, or thinking that someday there will be a plan...my advice is to stop.

I don't mean that you should stop setting goals or trying to accomplish things or stop investing wisely with your time and resources and everything else. I just mean that you should stop clinging to your plan.

I don't say these words without feeling conviction. See, I was the plan girl. I like plans. I have theories about why plans work, about how things happen, about the when and where and who of everything in life. That's been me in a nutshell.

Here's the thing though. God doesn't think too much of my planning. I have seen it throughout my life as He's changed my direction, refocused my attention, or simply bumped me off of the road I was on. And now, as I sit here on January 12 of 2011, I am beyond amazed at how wrong my plan really was.

See, I had plans on how and why and when my life would move. I had it all figured out. I should have learned earlier that my plan(s) may not work out according to my original thoughts. Yet I was (and often still am) stubborn. Stubborn and so uncertain and blind to so many things.

It has been over three decades of watching God work out His plans for my life. I didn't get from there to here without frustration and wondering and annoyance but, in the end, I find myself here. I am just an example of a person who is very slowly learning that my plans are really not the best. I would be well served to realize that my story and where I find myself today is fully not the result of my planning and that what is to come can't be written by me either.

I am fully and completely dependent on a God who works out His plans in His timing for His purposes. I should hope that one of these days I would set aside my own desire for writing the story and simply let Him work it out. For now though, as I prove to be the world's slowest learner, I am content to revel in His goodness and faithfulness even when I try to peek just a bit more around the corner at what is to come.