Even the Best Laid Plans...

I will never forget when the sweet elderly lady in my Bible Study grabbed my arm and whispered, even though it was loud enough for everyone in our group to her it, “What’s your life verse, sweetie?”

I laughed a bit, in the way of “I don’t know how else to respond so a laugh seemed like a good thing to fill the silence.” But she kept peering at me through her glasses until I cleared my throat and tried a real whisper.  

“My what?”

“Your life verse. You know, a Scripture passage that just always comes up over and over, one that the Lord especially speaks to you repeatedly through.”

I gave her a blank stare in response. 

“You’ll know eventually,” her turn to giggle now, with a friendly pat on my hand. “Mine is Jeremiah 29:11. Keep an eye and ear out for yours.” 

I cannot claim to have the years of experience and intimacy with the Lord that she has, but in the years since this brief conversation, I do believe that the Lord has revealed certain verses of Scripture to be specifically meaningful to me and our relationship. And one verse in particular presented itself again recently in an extremely apparent way. 

My husband had received some much due comp time from work and we had been planning an epic, amazing, camping trip with our two boys. Our toddler was ecstatic. It was all he had spoked about for weeks. He would wake up in the mornings and ask, “We go camping today?” Finally, the long-awaited day had arrived. We had done our research, bought our passes, and prepared our gear. We had scoped out the sights, planned the hikes, chosen the prime location. This was going to be a vacation for the books. A core memory for our kids. For all intents and purposes, from the human eye, nothing could go wrong. 

And yet, not even an hour into the trip, our engine started smoking. My husband grimly examined under the hood on the side of the road while I tried to keep spirits high in the backseat through pretzels and applesauce pouches. The string of toddler banter continued. 

“I’m so excited to go camping! We get to sleep in a trailer! This is so much fun! Are we there yet?” 

I knew before my husband got back in the car that we’d be turning around. I knew that the carefully planned and rented campsite would go unvisited, and the beautiful anticipated views would go unseen. He and I exchanged one look as we slowly turned around our heavily laden and Tetris packed suburban and decided in that moment there was only one thing to do: we’d be camping in our backyard. 

We arrived back home, back at our starting point, a mere few hours later, and after my husband diagnosed the issue as a blown radiator, we started to prepare for our much different-than-anticipated vacation. I was feeling pretty defeated, and yet thankfully, our oldest boy was young enough that he could not even tell you the difference. In his mind, we were having a campfire and eating jiffy pop and sleeping in a trailer all together as a family. Core memory still achieved. The frustration definitely lay more on my husband and myself. 

My husband mumbled something about being thankful the radiator had blown at a time when we were still relatively close to home and could easily get it fixed. This was true, but I wasn’t quite ready to admit God’s providence inside of it just yet. I needed to marinate in my disappointment and frustrated a bit longer. While he tinkered with the car, I wandered back into our house. I had legitimately no solid reason at all to go back inside, except a subconscious awareness to work off some of my angst. 

I took two steps into our house, and then I knew. 

The smell of gas was intense. Like undeniably dangerously strong intense. I immediately rushed to the kitchen, and somehow the stovetop, which we hadn’t even used that morning, had the gas running. I snapped it off and threw open the windows so the air could drift out, but my heart was racing. 

We had been gone for three hours. To this day, I have zero clue how the gas even got turned on in the first place, and how we missed it being on when we did our sweep through the house before leaving. But even being gone for that small amount of time, the smell had seeped through the entire house. I don’t even want to know what would have happened if we had been gone for almost three full days as had been planned. 

We had counted down the days and made reservations and bought passes and had a broken car to deal with and would be sleeping in our own backyard, but I knew then why God had allowed it all to happen. And I was, and remain, so grateful. 

There will be times in life when we will understand why God allows our best laid plans to go awry. And there will be many times in life when we will never understand. There will be many times we will never understand this side of Heaven. But our lack of understanding does not mean that He doesn’t have a good reason. He knows and sees all, and is always bringing about His will in straight and roundabout ways. 

So yea my life verse? 

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:9 

With a life verse like that, I should’ve seen something like this coming. But I’d like to think that the next time my best-laid plans go wrong, I will have a quicker disposition of trust in God, who is working all things out for my good.