Best Laid Plans

I have an admission to make. I am a planner. I am an organizer. Some might think obsessively so. Behind me on a long lower shelf is every daybook that I ever kept daily as a teacher and every daytimer that I carried daily as an administrator. There are thirty-three volumes each representing one year in that collection. The last ten years of my career are also preserved in an electronic form. Every once in a while, I do actually use them to verify what was completed on a certain date. They can make interesting and nostalgic reading. Even in retirement, I continue to plan daily and indeed every day starts with the review of my “schedule” in Office Outlook. I continue to preserve my daily plans and actions electronically and on paper. I plan each day as well as long term plans reaching about a year into the future.

Since the start of my apparently successful battle with cancer, I have realized that each and every day that Lozanne and I have together is a gift from the Lord. He is sovereign and I will live exactly the number of days that he has prescribed from the beginning of time. Despite this realization, I still continue to plan like life on this earth will go on forever. Every once in a while the words of my mother-in-law ring in my ears. When asked mid-week about dinner plans for the weekend, she would often respond with, “We could all be dead by then”. She was not the planner that I am.

This morning I was browsing through the Book of Revelation and realized that, as a believer, I have often been remiss in thinking only in terms of my natural life this side of heaven. There is another wonderful possibility that I don’t think about often enough. Indeed I don’t consider it in my plans nearly enough. In Revelation 22: 20, which is the second last verse in the Bible, we read the following.

20 ¶ He who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming quickly." Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Jesus has promised us that He is returning to take believers to heaven. We don’t know when. Scholars tell us that the word “quickly” in verse 20 can also be translated as “suddenly”. Jesus also tells us in the gospels that we will not know when he is returning despite certain signs that would suggest that His return is near. His coming is also described in 1Thessalonians 4: 16-17.

16 For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:
17 Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

I often forget that my best laid plans, so carefully transcribed and preserved, could be interrupted not only by my death, but by the return of the Lord. One thing is very plain to me; either way, my plans will be of very little use in heaven.

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