Struggle Strategy: Plan All the Things
When I was pregnant with the twins and the Man was deployed, I became a planner. There’s something about knowing you could go into labor at any moment (and need things squared away for your one- and three-year-olds) that really helps drive home the importance of having things under control.
So I planned. And I didn’t make just one plan. I made back up plans. And then I made back ups to my back ups. And possibly I made back ups to those too. In the immortal words of Eugenides from Megan Whalen Turner’s classic book, The Thief, “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!” And I quite possibly overdid on the planning front…like a boss.
I couldn’t control when I went into labor, and I couldn’t control the fact that the Man was halfway around the world. I couldn’t control where I ended up giving birth to the twins: in our small county hospital or two hours away where there was a NICU. I couldn’t control if the twins were born needing extra medical care. I couldn’t control…a lot of things.
So I planned. And frankly, about fifty percent of the time, having a plan really helped. At the very least, it made me feel better about how things were going. It made me feel like things weren’t quite so, well, out of control.
Which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. In all honesty, this struggle strategy can be kind of a mixed bag. It maybe should come with a warning label.
Sometimes careful planning can help us manage the hard seasons—we make our To Do lists, we sync our calendars, we write down the important things, and we find ourselves able to take deep breaths again—but often our persistent planning has an insidious under belly. If we flip over the rock of our best laid plans, sometimes we find, wriggling underneath, a lack of trust coupled with pride in our own capabilities.
Here’s the deal. I’m not pointing fingers unless I’m pointing them at myself. I am the queen of thinking, “If I do it, it’ll get done right.” Lack of trust. Pride. Right there.
And lest you think I’m speaking from the other side of this, I have spent my whole summer trying to get as many of my ducks in a row as possible so that maybe, just maybe, we will weather the next school year with more grace than we did the one before and I won’t want to quit all the things and crawl into a hole come October.
And that’s not to say that last year’s school year was horrible. And that’s also not to say that the planning doesn’t need to happen. No. It’s a both/and.
I schedule, and I surrender. I plan, and I force myself to remember who is in control. Again and again, I hear my friend Meghan’s voice (not Megan Whalen Turner, just for the record) saying, “I know God is in control, but someone has to schedule the dentist!”
So I schedule the dentist. And the well child appointments. I make sure I’m tracking grades and co-op expenses. I do my best to answer emails and make lesson plans. I set up my bullet journal like its the only thing standing between me and total chaos.
And then I remind myself that it’s not. It’s not the only thing standing between me and being in constant crisis management mode. Which is when Isaiah 26:3 comes to mind: “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you.”
The peace is not found in the planning. That doesn’t mean the planning doesn’t need to get done, and it doesn’t mean the planning isn’t a positive step in the right direction. It just means that true peace is about the direction our eyes are pointing.
Image purposefully blurred because I don’t want you creepers reading my planner…
Do I believe that God is good? Do I believe that God is sovereign? Resting my yes in both those answers is the only pathway I’ve found to peace. When my eyes are on Christ, the one who loves me, the one who is actually and legitimately in control, then everything else shuffles into second place, and this is as it should be.
Christ will keep me when plans A through Z fall apart.
Christ will keep me when I’m blindsided by the unexpected.
Christ will keep me when I’ve run out of pages in my bullet journal and the To Do lists keep spawning like a couple of rabbits and no one in the family agrees to get on board with my master plan for taking over the universe.
Christ will keep me when I’ve mistakenly convinced myself that I am the key to keeping all the balls in the air.
Christ will keep me when I have to humbly admit, once again, that He is God, and I am not.
So yeah, I’m doing the planning—next stop is back to lesson plans for my co-op class, and those lesson plans are not optional—but I’m going to keep challenging myself to look past the plans to Jesus. Because His plans for me come with promises: promises that He’ll never leave me or forsake me, promises that He gives perfect peace, promises that are worth resting in.
And while I will always love the way a perfectly color-coded checklist looks in my bullet journal, with all those neatly checked off boxes, He loves me. And wow. That is just something else.
