Anyone else out there like to make plans?
I don’t just like to make plans, I like to construct plans that are made in consideration of anything that could go wrong or alter the outcomes from how I envision them. My plans are on my timeline where words like wait and patience are banned.
When I think of my planning and of what the Bible teaches, my mind goes to Jeremiah 29:11:
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
Sometimes it is assuring to me that God is a planner, just like myself.
But, God’s plans are not always that same as mine, nor is his timeline.
Unlike myself, who plans while squinting into the foggy future, God has wide eyed sight of the end from beginning, and everything in between.
Proverbs 19:21 is an even better (in my estimation) biblical representation of how I need to think about my planning for the future,
“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.”
The Pulpit Commentary gives a great understanding of what is being said in that verse:
“The immutability (unchanging) of the counsel of God is contrasted with the shifting, fluctuating purposes of man ”
Whereas my planning is temporal, God’s is eternal.
It is not that I/we should not make plans, but that we acknowledge, in our planning, that God needs to not just be involved and consulted in our planning, but also that we ensure that we acknowledge that he is in control … for he truly is.
“As children bring their broken toys
With tears for us to mend.
I brought my broken dreams to God
Because He was my Friend.
But then instead of leaving Him
In peace to work alone,
I hung around and tried to help
With ways that were my own.
At last I snatched them back and cried,
“How could You be so slow”-
“My child,” He said,
“What could I do? You never did let go.”
(author could be
Loretta P Burns, Robert J. Burdette
or anonymous)
itsawonderfilledlife 