Plan B...

This was emailed to me this morning (thanks, Claire!), and I thought it was worth sharing. You should take time to read it.

And please stay tuned...I had a wonderful weekend and will be blogging about it all tonight! (I know you'll all be on pins and needles today as you anticipate the post)....

Running With Plan B. A special report on This American Life follows 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. Only one person confessed she was still living Plan A; she was 23 years old. It seems a trend for many of us: There is the thing we plan on doing with our lives, and then there's the thing we end up doing, which becomes our life. Here, Christians often have a nuanced view 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 leads the follower to something else entirely. But akin to the statistics in the room with Mr. Glass, it is likely that the number of Christians who find themselves living the plan they first imagined are also few and far between. For some, 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 many others who walk away from Plan A thoroughly defeated. Regretful turns and drastic detours may now be behind us, but our deviation from the journey is writ large before us. We have failed at Plan A, the plan we believe God intended; God's best is now merely God's backup. When life turns out to be something you didn't plan on, when missteps and unplanned detours loom with guilt, a life of alternative routes and broken roads seems certain. It is easy to wonder in despair what it means 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 your life. How significant, then, are Christ's words to his despairing disciples after an evening of mistakes, and to those of us who have ever felt the sting of falling off track. To these men who repeatedly failed to follow his instructions, Jesus simply said, "Rise, let us be going" (Matthew 26:46).A wise friend of mine once wondered if following God was not something like following the directions on a GPS system. At the beginning of the journey, the plan for arriving at the desired destination is set 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, 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) God is well aware that there are turns in life we can never undo, choices we cannot erase, and detours we were never expecting. Some of these turns God no doubt laments with us. But God is never deterred by our 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 our steps, while the end—God Himself—remains the same. Despite broken roads and secondary paths, God is forever showing us that the destination is unchanging, and in the end, God's best comes into our lives not because of our careful steps toward the divine but because of divine steps toward us. The God of the Christians is one whose plans are all-encompassing, whose arm is not too short to save, who goes the extra mile, and who takes every detour, that even one will not remain lost.