There is the thing I planed on doing with my life forty years ago, and then there are the things I ended up doing, which all attributed to what has become, uniquely, my life. Discussing (mind you, only briefly and just scratching the surface ) with some personal, professional, and pastoral friends, there are nuanced views of Plan A—it is God's plan we are trying to follow. But there is still very much an initial picture of what this plan, and subsequently our lives, will—or should—look like. God's best becomes something like a divine Plan A, while any other plan is to lead me to something else entirely.
But akin to the statistics in the room with Mr. Glass, it is likely that I am not alone with a large number of Christians who find themselves living the plan they first imagined are also few and far between. For some of my friends, this is seen as good news. Many discover along the way that they are doing far more leading than being led, and God mercifully redirects them. "Many are the plans in a human heart," the proverb reads, "but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails" (19:21). Others find the journey with God from Plan A to B to C to D an interesting part of the pilgrimage itself. Yet there are still others, like one of my most treasured and intimate friend, who walk away from Plan A thoroughly defeated. Regretful turns and drastic detours may now are behind him, but his deviation from the journey is expressed large in spiritual depression. Understand, I have been there. No condemnation. For I to, have failed at Plan A, the plan I believe God intended; God's best becoming merely God's backup.
When life turned out to be something I hadn’t didn't plan on, when missteps and unplanned detours loomed with guilt, a life of alternative routes and broken roads seemed certain. It has been easy to wonder in despair what it means to have missed God's best, and to believe that somehow God must, at some point, step back into the picture, disappointed, and find a secondary plan for my life. How significant, have been Christ's words to his despairing disciples after an evening of mistakes, and at the same time to me having felt the sting of falling off track. To these men who repeatedly failed to follow his instructions, and to broken and shaken, me, Jesus simply said, "Rise, let us be going" (Matthew 26:46).
Journaling this, I’m wondering if following God is not something like following the directions on my iPhone, or iPad GPS, used, more often than ever before? At the beginning of the journey, the plan for arriving at the desired destination is set before me. But when I accidentally turn left or am forced to take an unforeseen detour, the computer doesn't scold me. It doesn't force me to start over or announce that I can no longer make it to my final destination because I have ruined the route. In fact, it doesn't even make me feel guilty. The end still in mind, it simply adjusts the plan from that point onward, as if the “wrong” turn was a part of the journey all along. The destination has not changed. Plan A may have switched to Plan B, but the outcome will be the same.
Although Blaise Pascal was a mathematician who saw the created world as one of equations and precision, he saw the God who created this world as one who is innately personal, guiding, and accommodating. "[T]he God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation," Pascal wrote in his Pensees. "He is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses: he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy: who united himself with them in the depths of their soul...who makes them incapable of having any other end but him."(1)
I consider it a fact that God is well aware that there are turns in my life that can never be undo, choices I cannot erase, and detours I was never expecting. Some of these turns God no doubt has and now laments with me. But God is never deterred by my position. Plan B is not any farther away from God than Plan A or C or D. In fact, God sees only one plan: "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future" (Jeremiah 29:11). In this, God is ever at work redirecting my steps, while the end—God Himself—remains the same. Despite broken roads and secondary paths, God is forever showing me that the destination is unchanging, and in the end, God's best comes into my life not because of my careful steps toward the divine but because of divine steps toward me. My God is one whose plans are all-encompassing, whose arm is not too short to save me from myself, who goes the extra mile, and who takes every detour, that even I will not remain lost.
(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees (London: Peguin Books, 1993), 141-142, emphasis mine.
