I’m a planner. Routinely, the top strength on my StrengthsFinder list is “strategic”. I’m interested in goals and plans and anticipated challenges. 
And so while the rest of you are experiencing the let down of another Christmas gone past (sort of, I mean, it really goes on until January 6 if you want to keep singing “Jingle Bells” and drinking eggnog that’s ok with me). Like I was saying, while the rest of you are possibly mourning the end of Christmas, I’m geeking out about the New Year. Not the noisemakers and party hats and champagne toasts and Ryan Seacrests, but the calendars! and the lists of goals! And, oh, by gosh, by golly, the Gannt charts that I get to start working on for the year! I mean, it’s the most wonderful time of the year, it really is.
Of course, I will admit that planning is WAY more fun than following through on plans. Yes, it is slightly more fun when a plan completely comes together. But the reality of things are that I plan way too much – I build a little universe of goals and tasks and strategies and I get into the year and I find that following through on plans….gasp…actually takes time, and energy, and focus, and resources. It’s at this point that I start getting disappointed. I start realizing that in order to get everything done that I want to get done, I would probably need to clone myself….probably clone myself twice. And even that would only be a temporary solution, because in about six months, my clone family and I will get task saturated again and need to make new clones.
But then I stop and think, “Woah, this is just a little bit of what God is about.” God made plans for the world, plans, as He said, for good and not for evil. He gets really excited about His plans. I bet He even has the angels putting together some Six Sigma plans for better heavenly harmonization. Yet instead of creating clones — which was my solution — God actually decides that He is going to redeem people. It’s like if I would take your slacker cousin, you know, THAT one, and bring him onto my team of people who are working on my plans.
That would be frustrating for me. I mean after all, you know your cousin and all of the problems that would come along with employing your cousin to work on your plans. But God is filled with ultimate patience and ultimate resources. Daily, He forgives your cousin, realigns your cousin, gives your cousin the rest of the day off, and then gets your cousin the exact thing that your cousin needs to get back to the job. And this is great news…because let’s be honest, you are your cousin. God just brought you into His plan for the redemption of the world! When you read His Word, you see what He has in store for it, and oh man, what a plan! And He invites you to be a part of that plan. Not only does He invite you, but He invites so so so many other people so that you have such a minuscule part of it that you don’t have to worry about screwing it all up but you can just focus on little things that you’re actually able to do at your capacity level! And then on top of that He STILL offers to forgive you when you inevitably fail! What a plan!
Happy New Year. Let’s Follow Him in His plans, reveling in the fact that He counted us worthy to be a part of them through Christ.