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Planned

                Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done wonderful things, things planned long ago.   (Isaiah 25:1)

                One of the problems evolutionists have is that they can’t believe any being capable of creating all that is, in all its detail, with a few sentences. It’s all too complicated to plan and organize in so short a time. (One. I didn’t say they didn’t have other problems.) After all, it takes months or years to do an oil painting. An engineer takes time designing whatever he’s making and develops drawings and blueprints. He doesn’t do it off the top of his head. Were it possible for an engineer to design and build a living thing, it would probably take him years. Maybe decades..

                While we may claim we’re not evolutionists, I think we face something of the same difficulty when it comes to God having designed our lives. How could He have planned the second-by-second lives of billions of people and probably trillions or quadrillions of other things, both living and not, matter and energy, and thousands of years in advance? During an afternoon tea with the Trinity, and started it in motion after saying, “One last sip, and here we go”?

                I tend to think there is some wiggle room built into the dance He’s choreographed, that the color of the shirt we choose to wear today is a detail He doesn’t necessarily dictate. But as we look at our lives and at the things coming at us, we don’t tend to think in terms of God’s having planned all this out. We may know that the Bible say so, but we’re more like the disciples who fretted, worried, and finally accused Jesus of not caring whether they died in the storm. He may know. We say we believe He does know the plans He has for us…but when our stories become suspenseful, or difficult, or tedious, we get fussy instead of heroic. Or, maybe we get fussy so that we can become heroic. After all, heroism isn’t needed if there’s no problem and no risk.

                Today’s verse is one I should memorize and repeat as often as I feel fussy. It’s a step beyond God knowing the plans He has for us, it’s recognizing that whatever is happening is within God’s plans and thanking Him for it. It shifts the meditation from “Things are out of control, and God is asleep at the helm” to “God’s got this.”

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