Making plans for the future, or not…

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What plans do you have for your future? What do you see yourself doing in 5 or 10 years?

Photo courtesy of ©iStockphoto/thesuperph

Having an answer to these questions are very important nowadays, mainly in our professional career. People are expected to have a concrete plan of how far they want to go in the corporate ladder and how they intend to get there.

I work in a major international company, it is not different there. However, I always have a hard time answering that question, not because I don’t know what I want to do, but because I know exactly what I want to do: I want to follow God’s plan. So I myself don’t have any specific plans. And I only know what He has planned for me when He lets me know about it.

That usually doesn’t sound like a proper answer to managers or HR people. But I must say that it never prevented me from getting farther than I expected in my career. I learned that if you truly trust God, having the “proper” answer to those questions doesn’t prevent Him from taking you where He wants you to be. Actually, I learned that I am the only one who can prevent God from working in my life, by not following His will.

God wants us to trust Him with our decisions, as James explained:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” (James 4:13-15)

As James says, we are used to making plans although we have no idea what will happen.

So you might ask me, “Do you mean I should plan nothing? I am in college, I need to plan my career. Or, I am a father/mother, I need to prepare for my children’s future”. What I’m saying is: let God do the planning. Let Him choose and plan your career and plan your children’s future, and just follow His guidance. You may plan the steps, but let Him plan the direction, the speed, the rhythm, when to stop and when to run.

As for me, I know where I want to be in the future, because I know where He wants me to be sometime in the future, geographically speaking. But I don’t know how He will get me there and I am not sure what He wants me to do when I get there. But I am preparing for whatever it is. That’s my part: I need to be ready. For He will take care of everything else, as Jesus promised:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” (Matthew 6:25-27)

Give God the chance to take care of your future. And keep your eyes and ears and your heart open for His instructions.

This post is part of the “One Word at a Time Blog Carnival” hosted by Peter Pollock. Check out his blog for links to other posts that were written based on the word “future”.

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