Plans

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"--yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

James 4:13-16

I like making plans. I prefer to have a plan whenever possible, and I prefer things to go according to that plan. Obviously, it doesn't always work out that way.

I am currently approaching a big shift in my life, a major lifestyle change, the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. It's not actually happening for six months, but I'm thinking about it a lot and trying to figure out what exactly it is that I'm going to do next. At first, I was really terrified, because I was drifting without ideas. Now, I'm still nervous about the change, and I still have a lot of thinking to do, but I have some ideas, at least, which is nice. Interestingly enough, the having of the ideas was chronologically preceded by being more at peace with not being sure yet, with not knowing, with not having a plan.

During all this thinking and planning, I had a birthday that sounded like a significant number to me. It sounded so grown up, and I'm pretty sure that I used to think that by the time I reached the age I am now I would have things a lot more figured out than I actually do yet. That made it even harder to be OK with being confused and planless, but I've started being OK with it.

See, I used to think that by the age I am now I would need to be "set" on some particular path that I would then just Follow For the Rest of My Life. Well, I'm not set. And that's making me think that I actually have more time to figure things out than I thought I did, or that maybe I'm not ever going to figure it all out, that it's always going to be a journey, an experiment, an adventure.

It's OK if I don't know what the Big Plan is. I just need to find the next step, and keep asking God to show me where His will is for me right now. Not ten years from now or two years from now, but right now.