Man Plans, God Laughs

“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” (Luke 9:24). There’s a saying “Man plans, God laughs”. I don’t believe that this is necessarily a fair characterization of our loving Heavenly Father, but from our mortal perspective, it can seem like, to quote Bruce from Bruce Almighty, “God is a mean kid sitting on an anthill with a magnifying glass, and I'm the ant. He could fix my life in five minutes if He wanted to, but he'd rather burn off my feelers and watch me squirm.” The thing is, our plans are never going to turn out just as exactly and perfectly as we hope and wish. They say that failure is not an option, and that is true. We don’t have a choice. Our plans are going to fail. The harder we try to hold onto our version of how our life should turn out, the faster it’s going to slip through our fingers. But we do have a choice. We can cling however futilely to the version of life that we’re absolutely certain that we want. We are doomed to lose it but we can go down with the ship. Or, we can choose to voluntarily give up our version of life and turn it over to the Lord. Whether we involve the Lord or not, we don’t get to keep our version of life. But, if we trust the Lord, He will honor our sacrifice and He will reward us tenfold. He will give us a version of life that is so much better than anything we could have planned or hoped or dreamed or even imagined. We’re all going to lose the life we thought we wanted, but we do have the chance to trade in our meager plans for a truly great and marvelous work and a wonder instead.