My VISIT With Mother

Mother turned ninety last September, resides at a long life care center, nearby, which gives me opportunity of taking time most days of the week to either provide 7-11’s strong, black Colombian coffee or transport her to the favorite Cick-fil-a restaurant for lunch. More importantly, I believe, is the “VISIT.” 

Not the term for a brief sharing the obvious repetitive phrases, “It is so good to see you, I didn't know you were coming today.  How’s Betty?  How are the girls?  Are you working?”  That’s the introduction to the “visit.”  The visit usually begins when Mom says something akin to: “I was just thinking about what I am going to make for the next family dinner or Daddy hasn't come home.  Did he tell you when he would be back?”  Or, at times, I begin the “visit,” by asking the question: “What have you been thinking about lately?  The “visit” begins.  Although Mother will abruptly stop, her eyes welling with tears and focus on nothing that I can see, then returns to sharing from what seems to be what she recognizes as only yesterday's or the present reality.  It was one of those “visits” a couple of weeks ago when she said, what now, as become profound to me: “I didn't plan my life this way but is what I am doing.  Do you think I did wrong? Maybe I should have done something else!” It never fails, at announcing my departure, she will invariably say: “Thank you for the ‘visit,’  I loved it.” 

While ruminating, these past few weeks, on her poignant but profound brief statement and question I came across the American Life which followed the lives of several people currently living what they unequivocally call "Plan B." Host, Ira Glass expounds his thoughts on an informal poll and a seemingly universal human reality. He asked a room of hundred people to think back to the beginning of adulthood when they were first formulating a plan for their lives. He called it Plan A, "the fate you were sure fate had in store." He then asked those who were still following this plan to raise their hands. I smiled when I read that only one person confessed she was still living Plan A; she was 23 years old. 

I think that I fit in with the trend in many Americans: There is the thing I had planned on doing with my life, and then there's the thing I have ended up doing, which has become my life. I think this is what Mother might have expressed, as well.  But then I wonder, because she and I are believers in Christ, do we not have a nuanced view of Plan A: which is God's plan we have been trying to follow. But there is still very much an initial picture of what this plan, and subsequently my life, will—or should—look like. God's best becomes something like a divine Plan A, while any other plan leads me to something else. 

But akin to the statistics in the room with Mr. Glass, it is likely that I have found myself living the plan first imagined, also rare. I have come to believe this is good news. I have discovered along my carefully laid out plans that I am doing far more leading than being led, and God has seemed to mercifully redirected me. "Many are the plans in a human heart," the Proverb reads, "but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails." I would like to think that my journey with God from Plan A to B to C to D has been an interesting part of the pilgrimage itself, maybe even the gift of following an unfathomable Creator, a Creator who I’m still discovering to be far more creative than I would ever hope to be! Yet, I have met far to many others, my age and older, who have walked away from Plan A thoroughly defeated. It seems that although regretful turns and drastic detours may now be behind them, the deviation from the journey is writ large before them.  There have been more than a time or two in my journey that I can identify – I had failed at Plan A, the plan I believed divinely inspired; God’s best became merely God’s backup. I remember the wrestling with the guilt and disappointment of such a deviation.

I also remember when life turned out to be something I hadn't planned on, when missteps and unplanned detours loomed with guilt, my life of alternative routes and broken roads seemed certain. It was easy to wonder in despair what it meant to have missed God's best, and to believe that somehow God must now step back into the picture, disappointed, and find a secondary plan for my life. Then, again, the other morning at a gathering, I found it equally despairing to encounter a long time acquaintance who I hadn't seen in over a decade, who maintains he is living God's Plan A and in his indomitable way insists it is his own virtue that accomplished it. I wonder how are Christ's words to His despairing disciples after an evening of mistakes, both to those of us who have ever felt the sting of falling off track and to those of us who want a pat on the back for getting it right. To these men who repeatedly failed to follow His instructions, Jesus simply said, "Rise, let us be going."

A wise friend of mine says that following God is something like following the directions on a GPS system. At the beginning of the journey, the plan for arriving at the desired destination is before you. But when you accidentally turn left or are forced to take an unforeseen detour, the computer doesn't scold you. It doesn't force you to start over or announce that you can no longer make it to your final destination because you have ruined the route. In fact, it doesn't even make you 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 in your mind, but the outcome remains the goal, not self-invented praise for the journey.  

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. "The God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation," Pascal wrote in his Psensee, "a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, 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." 

I have come to believe with my whole heart that God is well aware that there have been many turns in my life I can never undo, choices I can never erase, and detours I never expected.  Some of those turns God no doubt laments with me. But God is, never has been or ever will be deterred by my position. Plan B may be a phrase I use to punish myself or others, but my God is not any farther away in what I am calling Plan A than Plan B or C or D. In fact, God sees only one plan: The LORD declares to a struggling people, For I know the plans I have for you,  plans to give you hope and a future." In this, God is ever at work redirecting my steps, while the end—God alone—remains the same.

Father, God, I acknowledge You as my shepherd, good and gracious, always understanding of my desires, wishes, and plans. Despite broken roads and secondary paths, You are forever showing that the destination is unchanging, and in the end, "Your best" comes into my life not because of my own careful steps toward the divine but because of divine steps toward me.  I bless You this day in the fact that You are the only One whose plans are all-encompassing, whose arm is not too short to save, who goes the extra mile, and who takes every detour without mention, that Bill Prather will not remain lost.  Amen