“Wrecked” Plans

In May I spent two weeks going through staff training at Kanakuk’s K-West location. I am working in the kitchen this summer, which sounded so scary considering I gag when having to do the dishes. Big shout out to my freshman year roommate Maci who would run into the kitchen and finish the dishes when she would hear me gagging. Anyways, it is SO much fun, by far the best atmosphere I have ever got to experience, just a bunch of girls trying to outserve each other. A place where you don't even have to ask for help because people see you and want to serve you. I’ve literally never seen people so excited to pan biscuits and do the dishes lol. Almost everyday at the start of our time in the kitchen our leader would give us a question to ask each other throughout the day to make sure we were bonding and not just getting the job done. Sometimes the questions were silly like what's your spirit animal and sometimes they were deeper. One day the question was something along the lines of what has God done that you are most thankful for? When she first asked the question I didn't even think of anything. I was just thinking about what all we had to do that day, so I put my head down and started doing my part. Our leader walked up to me later on and asked me the question, with no hesitation I said I was most thankful for the way God has wrecked all of my plans. When I said it I kinda threw myself off because it literally just came out. She then asked what plans were wrecked and why I was thankful for it. I don't know about you but I am a planner, almost every night before I go to sleep I have the next day planned out by the hour in my notes app. So I  then had to give her a two minute run down of how i've had my entire life planned out down to the hour since I was fourteen and nothing I had planned has gone the way it was “supposed” to. I didn't go into much detail with her but after she walked away I couldn't stop thinking about it. It's been weeks since she asked and everyday since, I have thought about all the “wrecked” plans in my life. I've thought about how it wasn't in my plans for my parents to split, I didn't plan for my grandma to die, or to lose my dad so soon, I didn't plan to get my heart broken or to switch majors. There's so much that is so impossible to plan for. I find myself frustrated with myself that things haven't gone as I had planned. I find myself questioning why God didn't go with my plan knowing that isn't even how it works. If there is one thing I have learned this past year it is that He has a plan and His plan is greater. It is beyond our understanding. I fought His plan for my life for so long, living in bitterness and anger. The moment I decided to accept His plan for my life, my life changed. I started to experience things that I never could have imagined. I made friends that I don't know how I ever lived without and I came across my very favorite places I never knew existed. 

There's a story in the bible about a man named Lot. He moved to Sodom with no intention of leaving. Sodom was a very evil city, so evil that in Genesis 18 God said He would spare the whole place if He could find just ten righteous people, and He couldn't. After decades of this evil behavior in Sodom, God decided it was time to pour His wrath onto them. God gave Lot and his family time to exit the town before destroying it. Genesis 19:17 says, “As soon as they [the angels] had brought them out, one of them said, ‘Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!’” There could be many reasons as to why they were not to look back, one being super obvious, stopping to look back would result in being consumed by the fire. But like everywhere else in the bible I feel there is a spiritual reason as to why they couldn’t look back, simply as an act of obedience. In verse 26 it says, “But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.” Now I am no scholar or theologian and I don't speak Hebrew but I listen to a lot of podcasts lol! I was listening to one the other day that was explaining the story of Lot and his family. The lady was explaining that the word “looked” that was used in Genesis 19:36 entails that Lot's wife was looking back with longing, wanting her old comfortable life back. She wanted to go back to the very thing God was done with. She wanted to permanently stay in a place she was only supposed to be passing through. She wanted what she was leaving more than what God had for her in the future. In the simple act of looking back she was prioritizing her past over her future, which cost her her life. 

Luke 17:29-33 says, “But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. “It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. On that day no one who is on the housetop, with possessions inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. Remember Lot’s wife! Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it.” What even causes wrecked plans? Well it's simple, expectations and misplaced hopes. That person and those things in your so-called plans can never give you what God can give you. We can’t try and get things from people that we can only get from God, only to be disappointed when our plans are what we call wrecked. Worldly things never deliver. Let us not be prisoners to the world, expectations, or misplaced hope. The truth is our plans aren't actually our plans. What we have made up in our minds isn't always what God has intended for us. We must remember, our lives are planned out long before we even walk the earth. Let us put our hope and faith in Jesus and trust Him for what’s to come. Let us praise Him when He removes us from our plans, even when it sucks because newsflash God's plans for our lives are never wrecked, He makes no mistake. So when he delivers you from expectations and misplaced hopes, don't look back, remember Lot's wife! To God be the glory, always. Be the sunshine on someone’s cloudy day.

Good Talk,

Rylie With The Messy Life :)