"But you are having come to know that because of strengthlessness of the flesh I evangelized to you the first...’
-So many well-laid plans. Truly - the mind of man plans his way, but always and forever the Lord directs his steps (Proverbs 16.9). We have plans for our events and for our days and for our lives. For our vocations and our vacations. For our retirement. And we plan how we are going to serve the Lord. Every last duck in a row. We are going to do this and that and the other, we expect God to bless our plans for how we are going to help Him out, we throw up a little dash of prayer for favor, and off we go. James calls it arrogant boasting (James 4.13-16). Truth is, we don’t know what our life will be like tomorrow. We are a passing shadow (Psalm 144.4), a vapor, a breath (Psalm 39.5), a pile of so much dust into which the Creator God breathed the breath of life (Genesis 2.7), here today and gone tomorrow. And yet it is with that very breath of God that we can praise Him, the One Who gave it to us in the first place. We can celebrate and spread the knowledge of His breathtaking goodness to our neighbors and to the nations, and we can help to bring the families and peoples of the world into the white-hot enjoyment of His manifold perfections. We were made for this. So it is totally good and right that we should aspire and even strategize and plan on how to do this. Just know that even the best laid plans can be frustrated, may need to be modified, should be held with an open hand...
-No doubt it was with this very missional intent, the highest of motives, that Paul set out on his mission trip to Galatia. Oh, he had a plan - a good plan. He may have even held it loosely, adapting as he did to the response of the crowds, to persecution, etc. But he didn’t plan to get sick, and apparently he didn’t plan on stopping when and where he stopped on that first journey, because he suggests that it was this unnamed weakness of flesh - about which there is not even a single mention in Acts 13-14 where Paul (and Barnabas) first visited the region of Galatia - this infirmity was the reason he even wound up planting the church in Galatia. Which is the precisely the point. Paul did not plan to get sick. Nor to stop and plant the church where he did. But the Lord had other plans. And tho it may have appeared that the delay and the detour were a deviation from his original flight plan, Paul was never ever even the slightest bit off course. Not in the itinerary of heaven. He was right where God wanted him. As are we all. If only the eyes of our heart could see this. Is there even the tiniest detail which escapes His notice? Is there the smallest glitch in our matrix for which He has not already accounted, which He is not working together for good? The Lord directs our steps. He was directing Paul’s steps - directly to the precise place where He planned for Paul to plant a church. Somehow Paul getting sick was always part of the plan. And so it is with us, in sickness and in health, for better or worse - ours is to do our best to keep in step with Him, knowing that ultimately He knows where He is going, where He is taking us. There is nothing wrong with a strategy or a plan. But ‘tis true - even the best laid plans can and will go awry. For us the question ultimately is not about where we are or what is happening to us - it is always about Whose we are, and about what He wants from us right where we are today... Wherever and however we are, we are to walk by faith and spread the awareness of His breathtaking goodness to all...
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