And you respond, “Wait a minute. What do you mean God doesn’t care about my plans? He loves me. God has my best interests at heart. He wants to bless me.”
That’s partially true.
Several years ago I was serving a large church as their youth minister. I’d been there a little over five years, and pretty much everything I’d prayed over and wanted to accomplish had happened.
There had been good days and bad days. I’d served to the best of my ability. I wanted to honor God in that place. For the most part, mission accomplished.
Then I was approached by a megachurch.
On paper, it looked perfect. It seemed a great match for my giftedness and passions. And they paid well. (As a friend of mine jokes – “Tony, the Lord is everywhere. Follow the money!” That is comedy, by the way. Don’t send hate mail.)
I’ll forgo the details, but ultimately I turned them down. It proved to be a wise, discerning decision. The gentleman they ended up calling as youth minister was flayed alive. It was awful. I don’t think he’s even in ministry anymore.
Flash forward a couple of months. I was approached by another church. This one felt different. It was smaller than the one I was serving. (And let me make this perfectly clear – bigger isn’t better. Bigger is just bigger. It’s a values-neutral thing.)
So, I talked at length with them. It felt good. I asked all the right questions. They seemed wide open to what I would bring. I resigned my current church. I planned what I would do when I got to the new church.
And I learned … God doesn’t care about my plans.
The short version is that I was seven months at that church before resigning. I’m sometimes asked, “Tony, why were you there only seven months? Answer: I couldn’t get out any quicker. I knew my first Sunday there I’d messed up. Big time.
I could say a lot more. Not today.
Perhaps you can identify.
Maybe there have been times when you’ve made significant plans:
- Where to go to college.
- What to major in.
- What your first job would be.
- Who you would date.
- Who you would marry.
- Where you would live.
- What you wanted for a career.
- How many kids to have.
And so on.
If you took a page out of the Tony Martin Operations Manual, you sat down with paper and pen and wrote down pros and cons. You set a goal or goals. You found your “why.” You broke your goals down into actionable steps. And you got after it.
This is not a bad thing. Actually, it’s pretty wonderful.
So why do I say God doesn’t care about your plans?
He really doesn’t. He cares about you more than He cares about what you plan on doing.
It may be – like me – that there was a time when you were faced with an epic decision, one that was potentially life-altering. You were certain down to your corpuscles you were tracking in the right direction.
And it blew up on you.
That makes you ask the hard questions. My almost-always question is, “God, how could I miss out on what you wanted for me so significantly?”
God doesn’t care about your plans. He doesn’t ask “Do you want to go through this loss, letdown, breakup, or defeat?”
Because – and don’t stop at this truth, because you’ll leave in a funk – in the course of your lifetime you’ll experience very one of those outcomes, and even more. Probably more than once.
It may be that this walk with Jesus you’ve gotten yourself into isn’t what you signed up for.
There is a purpose, though. It might not hurt to say this out loud: “There is a purpose behind what I’m experiencing.”
God doesn’t care about your plans, but He does have a purpose, both for you and for how He is involved in it.
Just as you can experience all the bad stuff, He will see to it that you experience good stuff, too.
How does He determine that? I have no idea.
The stuff that happens to you – both good and bad – is part of God’s grand design for you. In a more expansive sense, what is God’s plan for you meshes perfectly with His plan for the universe. Because, well, He’s God.
How does God want you to respond? He wants you to respond in accordance with His nature that He’s placed in you.
Conventional wisdom states that everything that happens to us will make us evil or more Godly (or, perhaps bitter or better.) Yeah, you’ve heard all that.
Our familiarity with that thought doesn’t make it any less profound, though.
The thing is, how we respond to life depends wholly on our relationship and intimacy with God.
The more intimate we are with Him, the more confidence we’ll have in Him.
I’ll stick by my statement that God doesn’t care about your plans. Yes, we should plan. We should set goals. We should work hard to please Him.
Finally, there is this:
When you can’t find a solution to a problem, it’s probably not a problem to be solved. Rather, it’s a truth to be accepted. God has allowed it, and He knows what He’s doing.
Relax.