“Where do you see yourself in five years?” “What’s your
ten-year plan?” Questions like these have to be among the most annoying in the
panoply of inquiries known to man. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the
importance of having specified goals and working diligently towards them. But
if my twenty-nine years of life have taught me anything, it’s that we cannot
know for sure where we will be even one month from now, much less five years
from now, so maybe we should stop pretending like we can.
When I was ten, my family moved twelve hours away from my
childhood home with the intention of returning in three years. Eleven years
later, we were still twelve hours away, and when we did move, it wasn’t back to
where we had left.
When I was in high school, I intended to get my Master of
Library Science right after college. Instead, I ended up going the archives
route in grad school and got a job as an archives assistant. At that point, I
intended to be done with school. Instead, when it became apparent any hope of
moving from part-time temp work to full-time permanent work rested in my having
a full 36-hr master’s degree instead of an 18-hr graduate certificate, I went
back to school and got my MLS.
When I was a sophomore in college, I thought I would be
married to my boyfriend in the next couple of years. Instead, we broke up a few
months later, and seven years passed before I met my fiancé.
When I was twenty-seven, my fiancé and I got engaged and
started planning our life overseas (in a part of the world I never in a million
years would have thought I would ever live), and we intended our married life
to begin seven months later. Instead, three months later the world shut down,
and now in the eighteenth month of our engagement, we find ourselves still
unsure of when or how we can get married.
Did you catch a pattern there? Intentions do not always
translate into reality. And these are just a few examples of how things in life
have not played out the way I thought they would. But individually and
collectively, they have impressed upon me the truth of God’s Word regarding our
finite understanding and the omniscience of God.
I’m not sure if it’s an American phrase, a Southern phrase,
or an Appalachian phrase, but I grew up hearing people say, “Lord-willing and
the creek don’t rise” when they mentioned things they intended to do. In other
words, “I’ll do such-and-such, if God wills it and if nothing comes up to
prevent me from doing it.” The phrase is said so frequently and with such
nonchalance that I never really considered the gravity of what it meant—until I
saw how often the things I planned to do were different from what actually
happened.
As plan after plan fell through or morphed into something
different, certain verses in the Bible began to resonate in a deeper way:
“The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes
his steps” (Proverbs 16:19, ESV).
“Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the
purpose of the LORD that will stand” (Proverbs 19:21, ESV).
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your
ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”
(Isaiah 55:8-9, ESV).
“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow
will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”
(Matthew 6:34, ESV)
These verses remind us to hold our plans lightly and to rest
in the sovereignty of God. But did you know that the very phrase “Lord-willing”
is biblical in both substance and origin? Jesus’ half-brother James writes in
James 4, “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, ESV, emphasis
added).
It turns out, to say “Lord-willing” is more than just a
flippant remark—or at least it should be. Because the hard-and-fast truth is
that we do nothing—not even take a breath—without that action being allowed by
the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of the universe and all that is in it. This
should cause us to have great humility when it comes to our idea of what our
lives will look like. It might not seem like a big deal to assert what we plan
on doing, but James reminds us that to be so blindly certain about our future
is nothing more than arrogance.
We know nothing, really, about the future, so as we think
and dream and plan for what it might hold, let’s be ever mindful that our plans
will only be fulfilled to the extent that God allows them to be, all within His
perfect will. And whether we’re crafting five-year goals or plotting out
tomorrow’s errand route, let’s suffix each plan with a sincere “Lord-willing”
and live our lives in the humility that such a genuine acknowledgement entails.
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