The human mind may devise many plans, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will be established.
I devise all sorts of plans, and apparently it’s God’s purpose that will occur. As a bureaucrat my entire life, my professional world has been made of plans. Plans about how to accurately reflect the cost of social service state legislation, plans about how to provide city services most efficiently and effectively, plans about how to distribute grant money to the agencies most equipped to meet the needs of the community, plans about how to engage the community in the work of the police department, plans about how to best administer a church diocese, supporting the bishop. Plan. Plan. Plan.
And while I have been a planner, I’ve always planned for someone else who’d serve as the decision maker, legislator, city manager, president, chief, bishop. I’ve always put together plans with a healthy detachment. It has never been my job to decide whether the plan was a good one, or to execute it, or even to decide to use it. My work job has always been to do my best to craft a path that I believe addresses the needs of my boss or the organization. I remember in local government management remembering an analogy that it’s like playing a card game. I can pick the game, and plan out a few good hands. Then someone else deals, and my job is to play the hand I’ve been dealt. Hopefully my hand is a little better because of the work I’ve done. Or maybe it made no difference at all. Now I make the best of what I’ve been dealt.
While I’ve understood that clearly in my paying vocation, I wonder if I’ve approached my plans with the same detachment in my personal or ministry life. It’s so much easier to be fooled into thinking that I’m not only the planner, but the decider and executer. I decide what my career will look like, I take steps to make that happen, and … I’m surprised with my well devised plans that are equally well executed do not end as I’d planned. (focus on I). Or I plan to move to an urban west coast city after our kids have left the nest. We move. Sell the car, the house, commute by bike, live in an apartment. So far so good. Then a significant illness hits my daughter and now we’re in a different city, and again own a car and house. Plans well made, and partly well executed, until they weren’t. The same thing has happened in ministry. Plans I’d made and partly carried out were wholly changed.
If these plans were made and changed in my paying world, I’d absolutely understand, and would have no sense of frustration or confusion. Of course it’s not my job to decide. I do my best, then hand it over to the decision maker and then I execute what has been decided.
Perhaps that is also true in my personal world. Perhaps it would be much simpler if I understood that rather than a city manager, chief or bishop, now my decision maker is God. I still make my plans. I still do my best to lay out what I understand to be the best path. God decides, and I play the hand God deals.
This may sound like a blinding flash of insight, but I genuinely have held that healthy detachment of outcomes strictly in my paying world, because it has always been clear, I’ve worked for someone else. I have never had a sense of ownership or turf at work. Or a sense of righteous indignation when I didn’t get my way. Why would I ever think that my personal life wasn’t exactly the same? That ultimately God is the decision maker, and I need to have a healthy detachment with the outcomes of my well-laid plans. I can make that distinction at work, I need to do it at home.
I had planned to work in two bedroom downtown apartment in Portland, commute by bike, and relish my empty nest. Now I live in a 3 floor brick home with a tenant and my daughter when she returns from the hospital, and have a car. This is not the hand I’d laid out. But now, it’s the hand I’ve been dealt.
This isn’t about simply begrudgingly coming to terms with this new plan. Rather, I think I will remember that the decision or outcome isn’t mine. Has never been mine. I know that at work, now I need to remember it at home.
This morning, I’m thinking about how easy it was to think that my life’s work was a function of my plans and actions. I need to remember that like in my professional world, I have never been the ultimate decider, and I’ve been ok with that at work. I need to bring that sense of healthy detachment to my home, because after all, the ultimate arranger of my life is infinitely more loving and grace-filled than any boss I’ve ever had.
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