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Stick to the Plan

  • January 28, 2019
  • Posted by: Carolyn Mahal
  • Category: Devotions
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“Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise. Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” – Proverbs 19:20-21

Ever bought something from IKEA?

It’s great!

The store has a fabulous layout where you start in a showroom that shows the quality and versatility of their merchandise. Sit on the chairs. Try out the couch. See how the utensils might look with the table and how the dresser matches the bed frame. Amazing! Once you finish strolling through the showroom, you will enter the warehouse portion of the store to find your items neatly organized and clearly labeled by the row and bin. These features are designed to make visiting an IKEA an event to cherish, not merely a shopping trip.

Ever built something you bought from IKEA?

It’s……….well…………how can I say it politely?

A GREAT BIG PAIN!!!!

Humor me for a minute. The materials are generally decent quality and they usually give you the parts you need – except when they don’t and you have to go back to the store to the “Bins of Misfit Hardware” for spare parts that have no name, just six-digit numbers (like prison mug shots). 99% of those pieces of hardware come ready to assemble with the aid of Sweden’s single greatest invention: The Allen Wrench. As for that other 1%, there are no tools in the world that will get them to come together in the way that a calm, rational, college graduate would have expected. In desperation, you go back to the instructions for additional help, only to see that they don’t give you additional help – just a smiling pencil outline of Fred Flintstone known as “IKEA Man” standing there with a beautifully assembled piece of furniture and a green check mark hovering over his head. They say that he’s smiling because he’s happy to have so easily assembled a great piece of furniture. I know that he’s mocking me, and I’m okay with it. After all, I was dumb enough to have bought this thing in the first place!

***The author takes a deep, calming breath***

People often get frustrated when things that should go easy, don’t. It’s understandable. We do our best to put together a plan and when the plan goes awry it wastes time, energy, and sometimes money. After all, we were all told at some point of our lives that there is tremendous value in having a plan. If you want to accomplish more at work, planning out your schedule is helpful. If you are trying to save money for retirement, a financial plan is critical. If you want to lose weight, a meal plan will help keep you on track. Planning helps to eliminate distractions and increase efficiency most of the time. However, there are still times where even the most carefully crafted of plans don’t work. An emergency meeting pops up on our schedule, an appliance breaks and we need to tap into our savings, or you end up at a restaurant where there are no healthy food options.

Try as we may, our plans sometimes don’t work. There are lots of reasons why, but at base level the reason for this misfortune is that we live in an imperfect, sinful world. We do things we shouldn’t. We don’t do things we should. Others let us down, break our trust, and leave us struggling to make sense of our situations. This happens to us all.

Even God.

Genesis 1 was His plan. We were made in His image to share in the blessings of His creation. Then we brought sin into the world and the plans were changed. Enter Jesus: God’s Son, our Savior. He came into our sinful world to defeat sin. He suffered death to defeat death. He brought life so that we might have it with Him and the Father for eternity. All of this destroyed Satan’s plan of separating us from our loving God.

Jeremiah 29:11 is a popular reminder for us that God’s great love for us never changed and that He still has a plan for each one of us. Solomon’s words in Proverbs remind us that as we too make plans, we should always seek out the will of the Lord in all things. When our plan aligns with God’s plan, nothing can stop us.

Not even Ikea Man and his silly little wrench!

 

Devotion by Richard Schumacher

LSEM Director of Programs & Services