This blog is for those of you who read my post last week and have been arguing in your head ever since. If you haven’t read it yet, take a minute to do that before you finish this or it might not make very much sense.
The previous blog was about how we have a human habit of getting ahead of ourselves and preparing for every possible (usually bad) outcome. We waste hours, perhaps days, of our lives occupying our minds with potential solutions to problems that may or may not ever come to pass. My answer for you was to stay out of the future. Be present and quit trying to plan how you might respond to events you have predicted with your limited knowledge and ability.
But some of you start questioning the irresponsibility of not thinking about the future. I mean, anyone knows that if you want to achieve a goal, you have to set one! You have to have a plan. You can’t just hope you will have enough money to go on vacation next summer or assume that the hotel you want will be available when you just show up expecting a room. Some forward thinking is necessary if we are to be functioning vs frustrating members of society. Even though it might sound like I am contradicting myself, hang with me for a few…
A few months ago I had lunch with a very motivated and successful business woman who gets more done in a day than I do in a week, and with a fresh happy attitude and mounds of energy. It was hard to have a consistent conversation because every other person that walked by knew her and wanted to stop and say hello. I was fascinated. She was meeting with me to help me figure out how to promote my book, shortly after it was published. As we talked about several topics I write about in my blogs, this particular one came up. She thought about it a minute and said that she understood we should give it all up to God and not try to live in the future, but asked, “How do we do that if we have meetings and events and conferences to plan? What does that look like?”
I sat there for a minute and I feel like God gave me an answer that might help her, but for sure helped me: “Hold it loosely”.
James 4:13,14 says “Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow…what you ought to say is, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’ In other words, “Hold it loosely.”
It’s OK to plan. It’s probably necessary to plan most things. Sometimes even far in advance. Part of dreaming and hoping means pondering what the future might look like. But, what I have learned is that I don’t always know what I need or what is best for me. On multiple occasions I have not gotten what I wanted, been sore at God and the world about it, only to find that if I had gotten my way, it would have been disastrous! And there have also been many times that the results I did get, even though I had planned differently, turned out to be better than anything I could have concocted with my small scope of vision.
So relax. I am not advocating that we all live like hippies and give no thought to the future. But, as you plan, get God in there. That part is imperative.
Make plans along with God, asking for him to show you his way and his will instead of doing it your way and asking him to bless it after the fact. And once you have made said plans/goal/resolutions, hold them loosely. God may have something entirely different and most likely better than anything you could imagine.
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