The best paid plans...

Sue and I have been big Strictly Come Dancing fans for several years now, and so I was delighted to receive an e-mail from Leicester's De Montfort Hall (DMH) last week with the news that Vincent Simone and Flavia Cacace, two former Strictly professional dancers, will be coming to DMH in April 2016 to perform their show The Last Tango.  Our tickets are booked and we are already looking forward to the show, even though it is a year away!

I must admit to being the kind of person who likes to plan things well in advance where posible.  The advantage of doing so is that I can then look forward to whatever has been planned.  For example, I find that a large part of the fun of a holiday is the anticipation before the event.  

Yet the truth is that our plans don't always work out as we had expected.  The well know saying, "The best laid plans of mice and men..." comes from a poem, 'To A Mouse' written by Robert Burns back on 1786.  It tells of how he, while ploughing a field, upturned a mouse's nest. The resulting poem is an apology to the mouse:

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane [you aren't alone]
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley, [often go awry]
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promised joy.

The Biblical letter of James brings home in a very forceful way the pitfalls of making our own plans and assuming that they will automatically come to fruition:

'Look here, you people who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to such and such a town, stay there a year, and open up a profitable business.” How do you know what is going to happen tomorrow? For the length of your lives is as uncertain as the morning fog - now you see it; soon it is gone. What you ought to say is, “If the Lord wants us to, we shall live and do this or that.”' (James 4:13-15)

This was brought home to me in a very forceful way when, on the same day I booked the tickets for the show at DMH in a year's time, I received the shocking news that my younger brother, Phil (who is the baby of the family, being the youngest of 6 children), had been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, and medically speaking the outlook is very bleak.  We are, of course, praying for God to intervene in a miraculous way in Phil's situation, but nevertheless I was suddenly brought face-to-face with the reality of the frailty of human life.

There is, I suppose, nothing wrong with making plans as such, and sometimes it's very helpful.  However, as James reminds us in his letter, none of us knows for certain what will happen tomorrow!  We need to understand that we are not complete masters of our own destiny.  There are so many thoughts going round in my head at the moment, but just a few bullet points will suffice for now.

• Never take life for granted, but value each new day;
• Appreciate every moment spent with friends and family;
• Don't hold back on expressing love to those dear to you;
• Understand that most of the things we argue about don't really matter;
• Never put off until tomorrow what you need to do today, for tomorrow may never come;
• Try to recognise those things in life which are of real value (e.g. relationships, not possessions);
• Put your plans into God's hands, and recognise that he is in control;
• God's promise to us is, 'I will never leave you, I will never forsake you' (Hebrews 13:5).
• Our time here on earth is temporary, but if our faith is in Jesus our eternal destiny is secure.

If you are a praying person, please pray for Phil, his wife Monika, and their two children Mike and Emily.