Part of God’s Plan or Is Life Just Sucking? How Do We Respond When Life’s Plans ‘Jump the Shark’

Ahhh life, always full of surprises! Loaded with lots of plot twists, drama, and interesting characters… a veritable Dickens’ novel; fun to read; not so much fun to live.  After all who really wants to be a starving orphan or caught up in the French Revolution?  But sometimes there you are standing before the gleaming guillotine with no twin in sight (Tale of Two Cities reference there for you).

So what do you do when your own life seems to ‘Jump the Shark?’  (Yes, a Happy Day’s reference right after a Dickens allusion – deal with it).  You might wonder if this is God nudging you back on your correct ‘plan’ or are these just the wiles of life raking you over the coals?  Which is it?  What do you do?  Barring angelic visitation or a terribly talented tealeaf-reader, you probably will not know which it is.  To this I ask, does it matter?  Should you respond any differently?

Bringing this closer to home, life has not quite been going according to plan as of late; some significant deviations between plan and actual performance.  So in the face of the realization that I had some major deviage from my blueprint, I made some key decisions and steps for a new plan.  And guess what?  Almost miraculously, things began to line up like Soviets waiting for bread or maybe lining up more like dominos (since the Soviet Union is gone– Right Putin?).  It was perfect.  It felt right.  God was guiding the way.  It was a miracle. All of life’s dominoes were cued up and all I had to do was push that first domino.  Then I could sit back and watch all of my problems get taken care of.  God is great (but not in the ISIS meaning of the phrase). 

So I pushed that first little domino and the reaction started beautifully.  The first domino hit the second, and the second hit the third.  This was going perfectly.  Then it happened.  As the third was just about to tap that fourth domino, a duck flew out of nowhere, swallowed the fourth domino which crashed into the stove which started the curtains on fire which then alerted the fire department who promptly ran over the neighbor’s seeing eye dog as their truck arrived….  Okay you get the point.  So here is am sitting in a curtainless fire retardant soaked  kitchen given the Heimlich to a gagging duck while listening to my neighbor wailing over a dead dog (That was meant to be metaphorical - I really don’t have any curtains in my kitchen).

Translating the metaphorical to the literal, that fourth domino was me selling my current house and then buying a very nice smaller house at a rock bottom price.  To make sure those dominos fell in the correct sequence, I moved 85% of my house into the garage, put non-refundable earnest money on the house, and had a new refrigerator and stove (duck proof of course) installed into the house I was buying.  But as life is prone to do and Murphy’s Law predicts, it all fell apart.  My buyer didn’t get financing at the last minute, bringing this perfect (yea, even divinely inspired) sequence of domino topplings to a premature end.

And I didn’t understand it.  In fact I still don’t. It seemed like I found the right path.  I mean EVERYTHING seemed to line up absolutely perfectly.  It was as if God moved the obstacles out of my way himself and told me to give that first domino a push.  But only three moves in, it all got ducked up.

Now I find myself questioning, why did God set this path for me only to let things fall apart once I put things into motion? Or was it even part of God’s plan? Or was God’s plan to start me on one path and then suddenly change direction because He knew I would not push that first domino unless everything was lined up? Or was this all just good old fashioned bad luck and nothing more than the chaos of life?  Or was it George W. Bush’s fault?  Or… I could go on and on.

So after banging my head on these questions for a few days, I finally asked myself DOES IT REALLY MATTER?  Sure the outcome is important, but should my RESPONSE be any different?  If this is simply one of life’s little catastrophes, wouldn’t I risk failing even more if I said “It’s God’s will, oh well” and did nothing but sit here waiting for providence to save my bacon? Or what if God is giving me a chance to learn perseverance?  I will not learn it waiting around. And then what if it is God’s will that I take a different course, I have a feeling if He was able to course correct me before, He can do it again pretty easily.  And like trying to find a door in a dark room, if I bang my head on enough walls, eventually I will find it if I keep trying.

Then logically (a shout out to Leonard Nimoy), if my response is the same regardless of what happens (keep trying to fix my life) then why waste time trying to figure out what caused the trouble in the first place? In the end, something has to get fixed or changed, and you and I are just the people to do it. So we need to keep stacking those dominoes, try different angles, different approaches. Don’t give up and persevere. It is, after all, your life and my life. And no one should care about it more than us, which also means that no one should put more effort into improving our lives than ourselves.  Stay calm and carry on.

Hallelujah, now where’s the Tylenol?