God's plans, words by Jill Carattini

Below are some excerpts from one of my morning devotions. It hit home as I am on this journey of the unknown. May it help you as it has helped me gain perspective.

When life turns out to be something you didn't plan on, when missteps andunplanned detours loom with guilt, a life of alternative routes and brokenroads seems certain. It is easy to wonder in despair what it means to havemissed God's best, and to believe that somehow God must now step back intothe picture, disappointed, and find a secondary plan for your life. Howsignificant, then, are Christ's words to his despairing disciples after anevening of mistakes, and to those of us who have ever felt the sting offalling off track. To these men who repeatedly failed to follow hisinstructions, Jesus simply said, "Rise, let us be going" (Matthew 26:46).A wise friend of mine says that following God is something like followingthe directions on a GPS system. At the beginning of the journey, theplan for arriving at the desired destination is set before you. But whenyou accidentally turn left or are forced to take an unforeseen detour, thecomputer doesn't scold you. It doesn't force you to start over or announcethat you can no longer make it to your final destination because you haveruined the route. In fact, it doesn't miss a beat. It adjusts the planfrom that point onward, the end still in mind, yet as if the wrong turnwas a part of the journey all along. For 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 asone of equations and precision, he saw the God who created this world asone who is innately personal, guiding, and accommodating. "[T]he God ofthe Christians is a God of love and consolation," Pascal wrote in hisPensees. "He is a God who fills the soul and heart of those whomhe possesses: he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of theirwretchedness and his infinite mercy: who united himself with them in thedepths of their soul...who makes them incapable of having any other endbut him."(1) God is well aware that there are turns in life we can never undo, choiceswe cannot erase, and detours we were never expecting. But God is notdeterred by our position. Plan B is not any farther away from Him thanPlan A or C or D. In fact, God sees only one plan: "For I know the plansI have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harmyou, plans to give you hope and a future" (Jeremiah 29:11). In this, Godis ever at work redirecting our steps, while the end--God Himself--remainsthe same. Despite broken roads and secondary paths, God is forever showingus that the destination is unchanging, and in the end, God's best comesinto our lives not because of our careful steps toward Him but because ofhis steps toward us. The God of the Christians is one whose plans areall-encompassing, whose arm is not too short to save, who goes the extramile, who takes every detour, that even one will not remain lost.