Not as planned
How has your week been? It doesn’t matter whether you are nearer the ‘control freak’ or the ‘chaos theory’ end of the organisational spectrum, the answer to that question will always be, “Not as planned … Not as I expected … Not as I wanted … Not as I hoped”, or something similar. The reality is that hardly anything we do – there are a few occasional and glorious exceptions – goes exactly as we had planned or expected. There are a thousand and one reasons why this is true: someone turns up late; something isn’t where we thought it was; something doesn’t work or gets broken; we underestimate how complex a task is, and so on. And why do these things happen? Quite simply, because we are not God. Our knowledge is limited, and we do not know everything; our power is limited, and there are things we cannot control.
There is only one person whose day goes exactly as he planned, for whom there are no surprises, and who gets exactly what he wants all the time – and that is God himself. King Nebuchadnezzar came to recognize this great truth: God is the Most High who “does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth. No-one can hold back his hand” (Daniel 4:35). Isn’t that amazing? He does as he pleases. That doesn’t describe my week, or even a day in it! It means I need to repent of trying to play God in my life and with other people’s lives; and I need to trust God to be God over my life and the lives of others. And he does a far better job of being God than I ever could.