Planning for Fall or for a Lifetime
It’s fall homeschooling planning time — a time of excitement for some homeschooling mamas and a time of dread for others.
Our Heavenly Father plans and He knows the plans He has for you. He said they are:
. . . plans for welfare and not for calamity
to give you a future and a hope.
Jeremiah 29:11
In Proverbs, God teaches us about planning. He condemns hearts that devise wicked plans (Proverbs 6:18). In fact, “evil plans are an abomination to the Lord” (Proverbs 15:26). He teaches us that plans without consultation are frustrated, but that with many counselors they succeed (Proverbs 15:22) and that “the plans of the diligent lead surely to advantage, but everyone who is hasty comes surely to poverty” (Proverbs 21:5).
Sometimes we make plans for a lifetime; sometimes we make plans for a fairly long period of time, like for an upcoming school year; and sometimes we make plans for just a few hours.
Ray, Connor, and I had to make some unexpected plans while were at the homeschooling convention in Richmond, Virginia, recently. We had pulled into Kroger for a late night snack after the Thursday evening session when the brakes on the back wheels started to make a strange noise. Even I knew what that noise meant. In the middle of a convention and eight hours away from home, we needed a brake job. Time to make a plan.
Step 1 — Decide to take action.
We could always ignore that loud noise, but that might be a deadly choice. Hmmm. We had better take action.
Step 2 — Make a decision to get help.
Ray is good at staying on top of car issues when they come up but he doesn’t have a lot of hands-on experience of actually doing the tinkering himself. The only things I have ever learned to do are how to put in gas, check oil, move that little widget on the motor of my parents’ 1960-something Volkswagen bus when it made a funny noise, and pay attention to the gauges on the dashboard and do what ever they tell you to do. Connor has some hands-on experience fixing cars but his advice was: get help. Ray and I agreed.
Step 3 — Make a plan.
We went back to the hotel where Ray looked in the old-fashioned Yellow Pages to find a nationally-known brake repair chain (in-town, we like to employ people we know; out-of-town, we want people who have a national reputation to protect) that had a shop nearby. He also found a place to rent a car. Now that we had resources for help, we could make a plan. We decided to 1) be at the brake repair shop when it opened; 2) ask them to take us to the nearby car rental facility; and 3) rent a car.
Step 4 — Implement the plan.
We got up and at ’em the next morning and arrived at the brake shop before they opened. The plan worked like clockwork until we got to the car rental facility. They were out of cars that could be rented by walk-ins.
Step 5 — Make mid-stream adjustments.
The car rental clerk called another rental facility and found out they had cars available, and our brake repair shop employee kindly took us there. We were in business.
Before noon on Friday, the brakes were as good as new. On Saturday morning, we repeated the up-and-at-’em-early, picked up the vehicle, and returned the rental car.
The whole getting-the-brakes-fixed-and-using-a-rental-car plan was in itself a mid-stream adjustment. Life is chock-full of those. Some of life’s mysteries involve knowing what to plan and when to plan and when to make mid-stream adjustments.
While we were renting the car on that Friday, I asked if I could use the restroom. The restroom itself was such a funny example of failing to plan that I decided to make a picture record.
While these bathroom pictures don’t illustrate important, life-changing planning issues, they do show how a lack of planning has cost people unnecessary expense and frustration.
However, how we handle important planning issues has a major impact on whether we fulfill our dreams or whether our dreams are always a mirage in the distance. Drifting is nice in a boat on a lazy river on a summer afternoon; drifting is not so nice when it defines how a life is lived.
Many plans are in a man’s heart,
But the counsel of the Lord will stand.
Proverbs 19:21
And your plans will be established.
Proverbs 16:3
That’s hysterical and so true! Thank you for the encouragement to start planning again. Stacy
And thank you for the encouragement, Stacy!
I love this but I also think I love it so much because I am SUCH a planner!! I am a first born (which is stereotyping but, in my case, it’s true) which makes me rather….er, my brother would say bossy…and I am also a Type A personality. Everyone in my family growing up were Type As so you can imagine what a war of wills it could be. I have always been pretty grateful for those traits because it causes me to plan,plan and plan. There have been many times though that God has broke that will of mine and those plans because they weren’t His. At those times, I have envied the Type Bs….with their laid back ways and shrugs of indifference and “whatevers”, you know, those that I usually scorned. I wonder if, when God changes their course, if they get as upset as I do? I love plans but I really need to be more in prayer about those plans, to make sure they are God’s plans. The last few years I have been praying more and more over just the small things or even things that others may not worry as much about. I have really been praying about our curriculum choices and extracurricular choices, trying to tailor things to and for my kids’ bent and always to bring glory to God through their character and our choices. I wish I had learned this lesson about 20 years ago! Thank you again for using your wisdom and what God shows you for all of us still praying, planning, persevering for the children we still have at home and under our influence.
You are so wise, Rebecca. It’s those small things that add up to a life!!
Thanks for the wonderful post! I’m one of those homeschooling Mom that gets giddy with excitement about planning for Fall, and just loves doing it…even though I know from experience that many of my plans will change due to circumstances I cannot control. (Such as job losses, cross-country moves, etc.) My goal is to take the Charlene Approach of calmly making mid-stream adjustments when this happens, and foregoing the emotional angst and drama that I too often indulge in!:-) Believe me, I am getting lots of practice in learning acceptance, and in trusting the One Who knows the plans HE has for me!
I have certainly gone the emotional angst and drama route too many, many times to count. God has loved me too much to make things easy for me; and through those lessons, He is teaching the calm. It has not come naturally!