CARE TO MAKE PLANS?

Life has a way of ensuring we never become too complacent.
It drops a tornado on us, floods our home and world, takes away our job and career, gives us a deadly disease, steals away the ones we love, just to make sure we don't start thinking about planning too far ahead.
Of course, it takes time to teach this lesson. When we are young, we make all sorts of long-term plans, many far beyond our meager reach. But, hey, if people like Bill Gates can dream big and find their dreams come true, why not us?
But even the dreams that are not so big, especially those dreams we hold tightly to simply because they seem most within our reach, time and life have a way of dashing. You may simply want to find the love of your life, the person you were born to be with, and time and life will find a way to either significantly delay that discovery, give it to you when you least expect it and are least prepared for it and/or keep it from you until you have already committed to another.
Just to prove to you, beyond all doubt, that God truly laughs when we make plans.
Or, as Issak Dinesen said in "Out of Africa:" "When God wants to punish us, He answers our prayers."
As we age, and feel the repeated stinging loss of our dreams, we begin to realize nothing ever goes as we hoped, as we wanted, as we had planned. We are far better off just living as God's pinball, bouncing from surprise to surprise, never truly stunned anymore because we have seen far too many. Even the words, "I didn't see that coming," no longer drip from our tongue because we realize we're never going to see what's coming, ever. Instead, every moment of every day of our existence is one surprise after another until the lack of a surprise becomes the greatest surprise of all.
Hey, today was a lot like yesterday. I sure didn't see that coming.
Despite this history of dashed dreams, smashed hopes and plastered plans, we can't help but hold on to a thread of hope, a sliver of a dream, a small piece of our plans. Maybe, just maybe, God will save the biggest surprise for the last, and finally let us have the one thing we want more than anything else in life: Love.
And then again, maybe He's just waiting to rip that, too, from our grasp and break it, and our hearts, into the tiniest of little shards.
Hey, you never know what will happen.
Just don't go making any big plans.