Have you ever had what you deemed to be the "perfect plan?" Maybe a career path or a plan to save up to buy that special something like a house or a car. Perhaps it was a plan to get married at a certain age, buy that house, and have 2 kids, raise them, have them go to college and then retire and buy a condo in Florida. You may be just starting your plan or maybe you are in the midst of it only to find out that things aren't quite going according to your plan. Maybe it seems like on the surface things are going a completely opposite direction from your plan was or maybe your plan has suddenly taken a different path that actually seems better than your original plans.
In my reading a couple days ago I found myself in 2 Kings chapter 5 where there was a commander of the army in Aram named Naaman. Because of his position people looked up to him and held him in high regard. I also imagine that because of his position he often got his way. There was one thing that plagued Aram and that was leprosy. He wanted this leprosy gone (as I'm sure most of us would) but he wasn't sure what to do until he heard a word from his wife's servant about a prophet who lived in Samaria. So Naamaan consulted the King and the king told him to go and helped finance his trip. He also he sent a letter to the King of Israel to request that he be cured of his leprosy. When the King of Israel read the letter he was greatly distressed because he knew that he did not have the power to cure Naaman of his leprosy. While this was going on the prophet Elisha heard about it and sent word to the King to have Naaman come to him. So Naaman and his crew went to Elisha's house. Of course Naaman realizing that he was going to the prophet's house went with all sorts of preconceptions, or what he deemed to be his "perfect plan", on how things were going to work. He thought, "Surely Elisha was going to come out to see him personally, call on the Name of the Lord, wave his hand over me and then I would be cured!" Instead Elisha sends a messenger telling to wash in the Jordan River seven times. This angered Naaman and then he started questioning the choice of the Jordan River saying "Aren't the rivers Abana and Pharpar in Damascus better?" Fortunately one of Naaman's servants was there to help Naaman and convinced him to go to the Jordan River where he washed seven times and sure enough despite all of Naaman's anger and pre-coneptions the Bible tells us that his flesh was completely restored and became like the flesh of a young boy!
Do our plans put God in a box? Do we have certain expectations on how things should work and when they don't go quite the way we expected we throw a fit about it? Would we have been level headed enough to finally decide to go to the Jordan River to clean our selves or would we have stormed off and gave it all up so that we would continue to be plagued with leprosy? So things in life may not go according to our plans and our logic. The question is, how are we handling those changes or those things that are defying our logic? Are we storming off? Are we quitting? Are we giving up on God? Are we giving up on our spouses, our family, and our friends? Or are we, despite how it may frustrate us, actually going after God and saying, "Okay God, I may not understand this but I know what your Word says and despite my understanding I am going to go your way." The amazing thing that I have found out is that when I make that decision to go after God's Word that He actually had a BETTER plan for me all along with even better blessings.
So what about you? Have you ever had your logic defied? What did you do? Or more to the point - What are you going to do?
Blessings and Love!
DD
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