Not Quite Finished

Recently,, as I was sitting in my room in a hotel in the Alps, I was writing out Psalm 138 and came across this line, “The Lord will work out His plans for my life.” I kind of froze when I finished the line. I re-read it half a dozen times to myself, and have already referred to it numerous times since then. 

For most of my adult life I have been tutored on the importance of making out plans for my life. Long-term ones (kind of like my Bucket List), yearly ones, which I have done faithfully for the past couple of decades, and ones for my team each year. Goals, strategies, and objectives, year after year, and how I’m going to accomplish those. Without a focus we don’t know where we are headed, or so I’ve been told. Then I come across this line from David who puts all I have been trained to do, all I have been told to do, all I have tried to do, into a new perspective.

All this time I thought I was the one controlling the direction I, and my teams, were headed in. Yes, I made those plans and objectives in concert with what I believed the Spirit was telling me. Yet, the itchy pronoun in David’s psalm just won’t go away. “His” plans. Not mine. His. Wow, stopped me in my tracks. I’m still unpacking, mulling, researching, listening, and contemplating all that is in this line. It’s very comforting to know that the Creator of the universe already has a plan for my life and that he is in complete control of those plans. Still, I have some questions about that, like, Where does prayer fit into that plan? Can my requests to the Creator alter His plan? It happened several times in the O.T. Sodom and Ghommorah, Hezekiah, Jonah and the Ninehvites, the Israelites in the wilderness, and others. So potentially, I do have some say in His plans for my life – as long as it is in His perfect will.

Maybe he already knew that I would come across some obstacles that I needed to go around, or over, or through, that I didn’t want to. So I ask for a pass on a certain issue and He grants it. In the end, however, I probably went through a heap of other learning experiences that brought me to the very same point that He originally intended in the first place. In today’s world, travel, particularly air travel, has become somewhat of a quagmire. We want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. We make our plans and reservations, buy our tickets, get our seats, head to the airport and ….four flights, five airports, two continents, some nights sleeping in airport chairs, and three days later we have arrived. The question becomes, “What did we learn from all the extra circumnavigation?” 

Did we have an opportunity to be kind to an obviously overworked and tired reservation clerk trying to re-book you on the next available flight? Did we make a new friend sitting next to someone on a flight that you shouldn’t have been on? Did we get to share the love of the Master with a flight attendant who  looked like she had flown for six straight days? Were you an example of kindness to everyone for your kids to see – who were traveling with you? And a hundred other circumstances that would not have happened if you had flown straight to your destination.

The bottom line, I think, in all this, is obedience. No, I don’t like the delays, cancellations, and re-routing. I get frustrated at lost luggage, hours of sitting on the tarmac, and middle of the night flights. At the same time I have to understand that I am walking in His plans and He will work them out. Little by little I’m getting a handle on this line, yet I still have so much more of it to work through.