The day before Christmas, I was busy getting food ready for the weekend. Eight people were on their way to our house for the holiday, and I wanted to get as much done as I could before they arrived.
We, like the rest of the nation, were in the middle of extremely cold temperatures. Our power had been off during the night, and on Christmas eve morning we were undergoing rolling blackouts. So much for cooking. Fortunately, this only lasted until about noon.
One day this week, I heard someone say, “Make plans, and watch God laugh”. I realized that we experience that again and again. We make plans, and there are power outages, cancelled flights, illness, and even death. It often happens so suddenly, and there we are trying to figure out what we are going to do.
One week before Christmas, the son of a couple in our congregation was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. On Friday, two days before Christmas, he died. His illness and death changed everything they had planned for their family.
There is nothing wrong with making plans, but we need to remember that God is in control. James warns about this in James 4. “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.”
I seriously doubt that God laughs at us, but I feel certain He wants us to give more thought to the way we live, planning every detail and then being frustrated when our plans don’t materialize. He has warned us that He is in control.
In the sermon of the mount, Jesus talked about our being anxious about worldly things. We are not to be anxious about what we will eat, drink, wear, or how long we will live. We are to, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matthew 6:33-34).
How different our lives would be if we lived as though God is in control, making plans with the idea that, if it is God’s will, it will happen.
Sandra Oliver