We get up everyday with a plan. Things to do, errands to run. There is comfort in that. It gives the morning a shape, a reason to put our feet on the floor and move forward. We tell ourselves the day will be orderly if we are orderly enough.
But order is a suggestion, not a promise. The car may not start, the store could close early, a neighbor stops to talk and suddenly an hour is gone. Rain comes when the forecast said sun. We learn, again and again, that a plan is a map drawn on water, useful but never final.
And then there are the changes we don’t expect at all. A phone call that brings news, good or bad. A result from the doctor, a child who needs help, a friend who shows up unannounced. The time ahead shifts not because we failed to plan, but because life is still happening around us, with its own plans.
It is in those shifts that we see who we have become. Anyone can follow a checklist when the day cooperates. Character shows when the list has to be set aside. Do we get angry at the interruption, or do we make room for it? The errand can wait.
So we still get up everyday with a plan. We still write things down and mean to do them. Not because we control the hours ahead, but because having an intention makes us ready to meet them well. The plan gets us moving, and the changes along the way remind us what the moving is for.
In the evening, when we set the list down, finished or not, we can see what really filled the day. It was never just the errands. It was the conversations between them, the small kindnesses, the detours we didn’t choose but walked anyway. That is the truer accounting, and it is usually richer than the plan we started with. And usually it’s out of our control.
“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow… Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'” – James 4:13-15
