Plans

          A new year naturally lends itself to the making of grand plans and resolutions, but most of us don’t even need a new year as an excuse to make big plans for our lives. Often, we tend to think past the present to what the future holds, and we arrogantly prioritize and plan our lives around our whims and desires without consulting God first.  James 4:13-14 reminds me of the arrogance of humans: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away” (NASB).  It is so easy to live in our plans for the future—the goals we want to accomplish, the places we want to go, the things we want to enjoy—when we fail to see the temporal nature of our lives. When we’re young, it is so difficult to picture the life-altering events that time will bring our way. It is difficult to imagine growing old or frail. It is almost impossible to imagine our lives as the vapors that they truly are until time passes swiftly and deposits middle age on our doorsteps. When the mirror begins to reflect the ravages of time and aches and pains begin to settle into the joints, reality can no longer be denied. James offers believers an alternate approach to the futility of living life by our own plans. In verse 15, he says, “Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.’” I have known one person whose life reflected this verse, and it left an impression on me as a teenager. I can’t remember ever making plans that involved him without his saying, “If the Lord wills.” The first few times I heard him say the phrase, it caught me by surprise with its novelty, but after being around him for a few years, I found that it came to him as naturally as breathing. I have thought about him often this last month since learning that he passed away in late September, and thinking about him made me think of the plans I've made for my own life. Thinking about the plans I’ve made for my own life makes me think of the plans God has for me, and I don’t want to lose out by living out plans made in arrogance because as James states in verse 16, “All such boasting is evil.”  I know that the plans God has for me are sooo much better than my own (Jer. 29:11) because I am His child, so why do I continue to battle with His plans? I truly hope He knows because I certainly can’t explain the ignorance that battle involves; however, the fact that I’m finally thinking about these things BEFORE making plans speaks of His involvement in future ones. I hope when we look back at this year it will be a vapor blessed with God’s plans for each of us!