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Kerry Campbell contemplates the continual struggle to reconcile God's plans with our own plans.


As it says in the book of Proverbs, “The human heart plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps” (Proverbs 16:9). Just a few chapters later, the message is even more blunt: "Many are the plans of the human heart, but it is the decision of the Lord that endures" (Proverbs 19:21). You could, I guess, summarize it with that old saying, “we plan, God laughs.”

We’ve all learned in this last span of time the value and necessity of the pivot and of adaptation, planning with a spiritual lens requires us to learn how to live in a more open-handed manner that embraces and trusts in God’s best plans for us.

There are lots of places in Scripture that indicate that God does have very good plans for us, and for most of my life, I thought that meant that it was my job to find that plan and stick to that plan that God made for me in love but was also somehow hiding from me like the most twisted kind of scavenger hunt? Anyway, I felt that that if I worked hard enough to find the path, but then fell off of it, like if I made a wrong decision about a job or a location, or if I became undisciplined about moving forward in the good stuff God had planned for me, then I’d just be out of luck, I guess, lost, and just running out the clock in this “less-than” life that I was now living.

Oh, friend, I think so differently about all that now. For one thing, I no longer believe that God is cruel, hiding the best stuff from His kids and daring us to find it throughout our lives, but also, I know now that God does meet us wherever we are. And I know, as the Scripture says, that God’s ways really are higher and better than mine (cf. Isaiah 55:9). It’s not my job to find and live out “the plan;” it’s my job to co-create with God and sometimes surrender to God’s plan in trust, even when it’s hard, even in the wilderness.

 

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Maybe you’re like me and you always want to know the plan. You want to know what comes next and how to prepare for it and how long this part will be, a sprint or a marathon. You gather in the details and the facts and your research and obsess over your choices, praying that you get it “right.” Well, as it turns out, this is actually called hypervigilance, and it’s been with me from way back—I tend to scan the future with all of its possibilities and do everything I can to make not only a way but the best way. Maybe you can identify with that tendency, especially if you are a parent of the ‘helicopter’ or ‘snowplow’ variety.

But I’ve learned over time that there is no such thing as an accurate scan or read of the future, no way for even the most diligent human among us to account for every variable and circumstance. We’re just people, friend. We simply do not have all of the information that we would need to make a complete plan for a life, though many of us do try. We lay out the hurdles: graduation, job, marriage, house, family, and we think that if we just jump over each one at exactly the right time, that this will equal our best life.

To all of those jumpers, I would gently say, be careful, friend. As the poet Robert Burns said in his ode to a mouse whose carefully made home he had just destroyed:

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
          Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
          For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
          On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
          I guess an’ fear!

 

The best laid plans of mice and men—they do tend to go awry, don’t they, friend? And we, unlike mice, bear regret when we look back and worry when we look forward. But the good news is that God makes His best drawings with crooked lines. The detours from our carefully made plans are the ways in which we learn and grow into the very best of what God—Who knows everything and loves us more than we know—actually does have planned for us.

 

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Here’s a fun experiment that might reinforce what I mean here. At the next party you attend, ask anyone over the age of, say, 25 what they thought they’d be when they grew up. Ask them what they went to school for. Ask them about the plans of their younger selves and then watch them laugh. Ask anyone over the age of 40 if their lives had rolled out just as they had expected. Are they working in the field they studied in school? Is their relationship and family status what they planned or predicted? Do they live now in a place or manner they’d thought as they started out? You may find that the happiest ones at the party are the ones with the most diversions from the path. They certainly have the best stories.

We don’t get to see the whole plan, friend, and the truth is that we couldn’t handle it if we did. And along the way, God does use the things we learn, our experiences and encounters, to place us, physically, emotionally, and spiritually in the spaces, with the people, doing the work, that He planned for us all along, if we would just let Him steer us. It’s crazy how it works out. After all, as it says in Isaiah, 

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways—oracle of the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, my thoughts higher than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

 

God’s view is just different; it’s higher, and it’s better. He sees the things we cannot in our present circumstances but also, He sees how it will all be woven together in time. And because He’s good, we can trust that He is using that wealth of information for our benefit. And anyway, as my therapist likes to remind me, we never ‘arrive’. There is no hurdle or end point or finish line that completes our journey until the day we go home to God. We’re always learning, always growing as we go.

And it’s when we look back that we so often think, of course. Of course, it had to be like this for our good and the good of others and for the good plan God has for us. Have you ever thought to yourself in looking back on a hard season: “I’m actually so glad that it turned out this way?” I have.

 

Click to tweet:
The detours from our carefully made plans are the ways in which we learn and grow into the very best of what God actually does have planned for us. #catholicmom

In this world which has been so disrupted on every front, we should know by now that there is no such thing as a perfect plan. We adjust, we pivot, we do the next right thing. And if you’re a control junkie like me, this might feel like loss, or like stress, believe me I know, but in the end, even the littlest bit of surrender we can muster can feel like the rest that we so desperately need. We can learn to consume our lives in the way it is given to us, in small bits, and rely on our very big God to sort out so much of what we thought was ours to plan and execute and manage.

So let’s hold our plans with more open hands, grateful and trusting that what God has for you and me, His beloved, is better than what we could have devised on our own. As it turns out, letting go of all of that control we never had in the first place is a great next step toward living a pretty beautiful life indeed. 

 

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Copyright 2022 Kerry Campbell
Images: Canva
"To a Mouse" by Robert Burns is in the Public Domain.