The Plans I Made

I am a planner by nature. I like to know what is coming, and I have spent a good part of my life mapping out where I thought I was headed, often in some detail. What I have learned, slowly and not always graciously, is how little of it goes the way I drew it up.

There is a line in Proverbs that I used to find almost irritating and now find steadying. It says that we plan our way in our hearts, but it is the Lord who directs our steps. For a long time I read that as God overruling me. Lately I read it differently, as God walking with me down roads I would never have chosen and would not now trade.

The Letter of James puts it more bluntly. He writes to people busy announcing their plans for the year ahead, and reminds them they do not actually know what tomorrow holds, so they would do better to say, if the Lord wills, we will do this or that. I do not think James is against planning. I think he is against the quiet pride of assuming the future is mine to arrange.

I still make my plans. I just hold them more loosely than I used to, and I have stopped treating a closed door as a disaster. Some of the best things in my life arrived only because something I wanted very much did not work out.