Making Plans

“I’m kinda nervous I’ll break my nose one of these times. Other than that, it’s fine.”

Last fall my teenager daughter declared that her room needed a loft bed. A trip to Home Depot and a weekend later, we found ourselves in her bedroom smelling of sawdust as we followed the penciled plan we’d sketched on a scrap of paper.

I have to say, we girls built a pretty nice little loft bed, complete with built-in bookshelves and only a smidge of wobble.

But…well, we ran out of time that day. And got busy the next. And, well...we never quite got around to building a ladder.

My daughter, who is patience personified when it comes to her mother, climbs into her up-in-the-air bed each night using a short stepstool. She balances on the top step, grabs the edge of the bed, then launches herself up onto the mattress. It works, but she often lands, yes, directly on her nose. Other than that, she assures me sweetly, it’s fine.

Fast forward past a busy year to early June. In our usual beginning-of-summer family meeting, I declared it The Summer of Mom. Such a list I had brought to the table! A master to-do list of all the things we were going to accomplish before school started. Back-yard fires and marshmallows. Massive cleaning projects in the basement. Tie-dying on the back porch. And, by golly, I WAS going to build that ladder. It was all part of the plan, and it was all going to get done.

Want to guess what I didn’t accomplish over the summer?

No tie-dying. No basement purges. And no ladder for my poor nose-smushed daughter.

I reeely, reeeely intended to get that ladder built. That was the plan. But plans...well, they just don't seem to go as planned.

Life is like that, I reckon.

A carefully rehearsed argument refuses to go as scripted.

You plan the perfect vacation, and it rains every single day.

A phone call, a construction zone, a child's cough, and just like that a pre-planned day can be thrown completely off course.  

Many are the plans in a man’s heart. But it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.  Proverbs 19:21

Oh, how we plan. Out of our worries and our enthusiasms come days and days and days full of plans, plans that simply will not go as planned.

Except for one. The one we don't make for ourselves.

God's a really good planner. I think maybe that's because He keeps it simple.

It's tempting to think of God's plan as being really big and complicated, encompassing every move of our day in a flurry of divine micromanagement. But while God's plan may be big, it's not complicated. It is a very simple plan, and it has been His plan since the beginning of time. And what is that plan?

To love us. And to make us His.

Throughout the entire Bible and up to this very minute, everything God has done has been in service to this simple, beautiful plan. Old Testament rules and manna in the wilderness. A cross on a hill, an empty tomb. The ins and outs and good days and tough days we are allowed to face...all part of that simple, simple plan.

I am struck by the beauty of that simplicity. And the strength of it. God's enduring focus on doing whatever it takes to guide his obstinate people toward the gifts He wishes to give them makes everything that happens in a day make sense as a part of His big but not complicated plan.

I plan my summers and my vacations and my columns and my arguments to the moment and am absurdly astonished when they go askew. Perhaps I need to take a lesson from God's planning expertise and learn to keep it simple.

The new plan: Be loved. Be His. And love those around me.

There, that's better. That's a plan to lean a day against. When the ladder doesn't get built and I am buried under my to do list and it rains when I want sunshine, things can still go according to plan.

At the end of today, let's look back with a smile at the human-laid plans that just didn't work out. And remember the bigger, simpler plan that was there all along. Whatever the day holds, you are loved. You are His because of Jesus, whoever you may be. And tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, that big, simple plan will still hold true. You will be loved infinitely by your Creator. You will be wanted by Him, no matter what.

Plan on it.

First published in The Alpena News on September 24, 2016