Why Planning Can Help You Cope with the Ups and Downs of Life

Posted on Jul 27, 2023 Topic : Inspirational/Devotional, Women's Christian Living
Posted by : Tsh Oxenreider

It often feels like there’s very little throughout our lives over which we have control. We may spend countless hours dreaming of walking the hallowed halls of a favorite university, decorating our teenage bedrooms with pennants of the team, and angling our transcripts to hedge our bets on acceptance, only to find a rejection letter one day in the mailbox. We may board a plane for a family reunion, only to miss most of the event because of a delayed flight and a missed connection, and then spend the weekend at a nameless airport gate on standby. We see the positive pink line on a test and buy a crib and stroller, only to find out a few months later we’ll need to exchange that stroller for a two-seater and squeeze another crib into the corner to match the twins growing inside.

Life never goes according to plan.

Usually, it’s the little things that surprise us and keep us on our toes, daily and weekly tossing us curveballs for which we need to adjust our swing and choke up on the bat. We might decide on Sunday afternoon to grill chicken and vegetables for dinner on Wednesday, only to glance out our kitchen window as we marinate the meat and witness a midweek downpour. We study hard for the test, sure the teacher will ask about mitochondria or the Treaty of Ghent or Brontë’s use of gothic symbolism, only to find out something entirely different was on her mind. We may pull up to the drive-through with a hankering for our favorite milkshake, only to find out the machine is broken. We may plant pole beans and peas, only to see the chickens dig up the sprouts for a late-afternoon snack in the garden. (That last one from recent experience.)

If we wake up expecting our days to go exactly how we want, or even how we imagine, we’ll walk through life in a constant state of disappointment. It defies logic for us to ask the movements and rhythms of life to be predictable, please and thank you, and yet we crave it all the same. Our bodies long for routine and regimen; we function best with roughly the same sleeping patterns, eating patterns, and traffic patterns. Even if we crave the occasional surprise dessert or whimsical day trip, those changes to our rhythm feel special because they’re unusual. If we expect them regularly, they cease to be surprises and, by definition, morph into routines.

We make best-laid plans with good intentions, yet life necessitates an open hand to these ideas. We can’t go through our days on the offense, ready to slam away all those unplanned pests like a game of whack-a-mole—we’d be exhausted. (Perhaps we are.) But we also can’t dig our heels into the ground, refusing to flex with whatever comes our way, because we’ll become brittle, rigid, curmudgeons of life. No one wants to become a curmudgeon.

So what’s to be done? Blow around like a leaf in the wind with no agenda to our day whatsoever? Of course not. Be a drill sergeant of our time, trying to force it to bend to our will even when it can’t be done? Not possible.

Instead, we plan our days and weeks with good intentions and thoughtful respectability, echoing the ancient words from King Solomon when he said, “We can make our plans, but the Lord determines our steps” (Proverbs 16:9 nlt). Plan, yes. But be open to wherever the day’s path leads.

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Discover how you can bookend your days with intention and gratitude in Tsh's new journal.