FUTURE PLANNING

"The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time."

- Abraham Lincoln

New Year's Day is more than a week away but I already have my planning calendar and it has dates written in it as far ahead as next September - 2011, that is.  I actually keep four calendars. One, my sermon planning calendar has been in my possession since early August.  In early September I purchased my long range planner  (the one mentioned above). It contains my daily planner (which is my third calendar) and I have fairly detailed plans written in for the first week of January. The fourth is my office calendar which I produce weekly for the benefit of my Administrative Assistant, Patty. It is on my computer and is printed out for her each Monday.  At the time of this writing, next week has about four confirmed appointments.

Calendars are one of the tools that I use to keep a clear focus on the future and plan to be ready to meet the future,  Such planning can be considered presumptuous.  James writes:

"Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.”  Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.  Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”  As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil." - James 4.13-16

If I believed that those calendars defined my future or put me in charge of my future; such planning would indeed be presumptuous.  More than that, it would be sinful.

But not too plan at all would also be presumptuous and even sinful.  I'd be saying, "God, I have no responsibility to be a good steward of my time." Simply going with the flow would give me an excuse to drift along any current instead of following the command, "Redeem the time."

We are warned not to worry about the future. Jesus says very plainly in Matthew 6:34: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."       

Jeremiah 29:11 shares these words from the Lord."For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future."

Good future planning is to seek the mind of God to discover what those plans are and to plan to follow them.