Tentative Plans

Well, time marches on.  We got done with Thanksgiving, and now it’s time to get ready for Christmas.  Last Saturday it sure didn’t seem like Christmas weather—it was in the 50s, bright sunshine, no wind.  Now, though, that has all changed.  Monday through Wednesday we got a bunch of snow with very strong winds, and really just today is when things are getting back to normal.

But really, that’s nothing unusual around here.  If there’s one thing we know about the weather it’s that it will change.  And if there’s another thing we know about the weather, it’s that we’re going to have cold and snow at some point.  Sometimes we have it at many, many points.  That could happen this year, or it might not.  We’ll just have to see.

The weather we have this time of year means that all of our plans are actually tentative plans.  For example, we were supposed to take Wanda’s parents to Sioux Falls Monday.  We knew that was a tentative plan.  Had it turned out that the weather was better than what was forecast, we’d have gone.  As it did turn out, we didn’t.  But up through Sunday, there was no way for us to know.  We just had to wait and see.

But you know, that’s really kind of a Biblical attitude, when you think about it.  James writes that it is arrogant to say that tomorrow we will do this or that.  What we should say, James writes, is “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that”.  James reminds us that none of us is ever promised tomorrow, that our lives are “a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes”.

Now, that’s not to say that we should never make a plan beyond today.  It’s pretty much impossible to live our lives that way.  But we should remind ourselves that our plans are, in fact, tentative plans.  They are dependent on a lot of things.  And one of the things they are dependent on is God’s will.  I wonder sometimes if maybe the weather we have around here is God’s way of reminding us of that.

There’s another aspect to James’ statement, too.  It’s not just that our plans depend on God’s will.  It’s that, in making our plans, we should be trying to do God’s will.  If we open ourselves to God’s leading and God’s guidance, if we make our plans with the goal of doing God’s will, there’s a lot better chance that we will actually end up doing what we planned to do.

So, I have a plan for what I’m going to do today.  If it’s God’s will, I’ll do it.  If it’s not, I’ll do something else.  But either way, our prayer should always be, “Thy will be done”.