5 Year Plans - Flushed

My CLB was famous for planning for the future. We were yearly instructed to write out our plan for the year, the next 5 years and maybe even the next 10 years. We would bring it down to the front, put it in a basket and ask God to bless it. This was extremely hard for me. I felt ashamed that I could not do this but really, I had to face the fact that my life was not mine to plan. For one, I was a wife of one, a mom of 7, and a daughter of 2 elderly parents who live just 10 steps outside my house. My life mostly revolves around other’s lives of which I have very little control. I’m a support person. I do have my own will and can plan some things that I want to do, but if someone gets sick or has a great need, I am the one to whom they turn. I don’t resent this, it just makes it hard to plan for 5 years in the future - or tomorrow with any certainty.

Then when you bring in the whole CLB thing it got even harder. They wanted you to be brilliant and plan for the future but they also wanted your future to be planned around making their future turn out like they wanted. This was not a democratic society I lived in. They planned the future for the ‘church’ and then the ‘church’ made it happen. If you were not on board for this then you were labeled “in rebellion or not one of us.”

So how in the heck was I to make out a five year plan? I hated it each year. I think I did it one year and then looked at it at the end of the year and swore I would never do it again. It just mocked me. It was a wish list, not a one year plan.

In our leaving the whole CLB, even the plans that I did have are totally gone. I am like a person out to sea with no ability to steer and it is a very cloudy night. I have NO idea what course to chart or direction to head. I felt that this was somehow not OK. We were supposed to know what we were to do, right? At least at some point we would have a clue…..right?

So when Watchman wrote this up the other day, I thought it was spot on and it gave me hope for not having a plan in sight. He says, in summing his post up:
Keep learning who you are and let that uniqueness define and shape you and what you do. Don’t be so concerned about the details of the future as you are with the details of your identity. Knowing this helped me make the decision to leave the Church As We Know It and start creating my role in the Church of the Future. I think it will serve you well, also.

And then another blogger that I have truly enjoyed following the past month or two (and can’t wait till she opens comments again after lent) wrote this about planning for the future:

So, a couple years ago, I decided to set aside the spreadsheets and the goals lists. I decided to stop praying this:
Give us this day a detailed plan of how You're going to provide bread for us every day
for the next 20 years with specifics as to what quantities You will provide and at what intervals we can expect to receive them so that I might work that into my goals milestones.
And to start praying this:
Give us this day our daily bread.

And:

Perhaps it's my nonreligious background, but I continue to be amazed that my life has not fallen into scattered chaos without my planning it out to the last detail. What I secretly worried would happen is that this whole "following God's will" thing would lead to me jumping from one idea to the next, leaving a bunch of unfinished projects in my wake after I drifted off to do the next thing that I decided was "God's will." But that hasn't happened. Looking back at the past couple of years, there's more clarity in my life than ever before. It's like watching a play unfold: I see storylines cropping up, I'm starting to see a clear direction and purpose in where I have been led so far...I just don't know where it's going from here, or how it's going to end. As I've said before, it's more exciting than anything I could have ever planned.

As I said, it is sometimes better to let someone else speak because they sometimes can say it far better than we would have.