Episode 43 - When Life Doesn’t Go Exactly to Plan

When life doesn’t go exactly to plan. When. This title of course, is said with no small amount of irony, for in my experience the rare moments are when life does go as you might have foreseen it not when it doesn’t. Even so, it still seems to take us by surprise and leave us feeling a little lost. Now being a good child of western culture, I like to have a plan. To have targets, aims and objectives. To have a sense that I know where I am going and what I’m trying to do. I am not saying that this is a bad thing, but it is perhaps naïve of me to believe in the false sense of complete control that I sometimes like to try to give myself. I’m a pretty laid back Englishman and I’ve been following God long enough to realise that trying to second guess God’s plans for me rarely leaves both He and I on the same page. My friend once told me that it is best to hold one’s plans like a butterfly; hold them too loosely and they fly away, hold them too tightly and they die. It’s advice that I like to think that I live by and I like to think that all of my plans are free to change and never tied down, it’s only when they are challenged and brought into question that I realise that I have set these idea so firmly in place.

My plan in life is generally pretty simple and free flowing; follow God. And what I’m expecting to achieve is I used to think pretty simple and free flowing too; keep doing whatever you last felt certain God wanted you to be doing with life until you feel certain that He’s telling you to do something else. That last instruction was join MAF as an engineer working for CRMF in Papua New Guinea. Yet right now, my life doesn’t look like the plan. Not at all. Or at least not how I envisioned the plan. I’m not for a second saying that the plan has changed, that God has a new task in mind for me, and yet geographically, I couldn’t be further away from the plan without wearing a spacesuit. Or at least further away from what I had unwittingly assumed that plan looked like. You see, I had thought that I had left God to draw up the plans for my life, but when He gave them to me, or at least the next part of it that I needed, I filled it up with details based upon my assumptions without even realising it. Assumptions like serving CRMF in Papua New Guinea required being in Papua New Guinea, not being in England for an unknown amount of time without any clear reason according to the piece of the plan that I have, only six months after moving to Papua New Guinea. Now that doesn’t sound unreasonable, in fact it sounds like a fairly sensible assumption to me. But God doesn’t think like man (and just as well too).

My plan, my visualisation of God’s plan for me has been brought into question, because I have been taken by surprise by this. But God is never taken by surprise. It’s not possible that God’s plan has been foiled by something He didn’t see coming and so it must be part of the plan, just part that I didn’t realise was there because God hadn’t told me, because I didn’t need to know. But it felt wrong to me because I had decided for myself what this plan should look like, because whilst wanting to be a follower of God, I still wanted to be the leader of my own destiny. There is nothing wrong with being proactive, but these two things are at odds, and pursuit of both will ultimately lead to disappointment. I’m tempted to pursue both because I too easily feel that to achieve God’s plan, to achieve what He wants for me, I must really want it, to chase it, and to take control. But I cannot achieve any of this. And I cannot understand or even imagine the fullness of God’s plans, and I certainly cannot lead myself there. No. I can’t do the things that God wants for me by pursuing my own destiny, no matter how eagerly I pursue it. Nor can I even get there by pursuing God’s plans for me. But only by simply pursuing God. And so in this time, as my world has been literally turned upside down and the horizon does flips, I can let go of all of my presumptions and the things that tie me in knots, the things I wrongly think I need to do and things that I cannot do on my own. I can take a deep breath, fix my eyes on God and know that here looking at Him is right where I need to be.