My wife turns to me most mornings with the words, “What’s our plan for today?” Like my wife and me, most people probably start their days with some kind of plan.
Plans are generally helpful. I spent several years as a stay-at-home dad; I know from experience that things generally don’t get done in a home without some form of planning.
In the business world, planning is an integral aspect of management training. Personnel are trained to plan campaigns and activities as well as to plan future finances by making budgetary projections.
However, this sometimes leads to an interesting corollary: We may feel a need to try to mold the facts to our plans. For instance: ever heard anyone responsible for a sales budget talking about trying to meet his budgeted sales figure? What about companies, some of them quite large, trying to pull sales out of a hat so that they can live up to their planned and budgeted profit?
Thoughtful management and development are necessary for any company, but such preoccupation with a plan may sometimes place too much emphasis on the plan itself rather than on real results that are the fruit of honest labor. So, what constitutes a good plan—one that brings satisfaction and lasting beneficial effects to ourselves and others?
If we look at Christ Jesus as our example, we see that he yielded to God’s plan, even when that plan came at what might seem to us to be inconvenient moments. Once a desperate father, Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, implored Jesus to come heal his critically ill daughter (see Luke 8:41–56).
As Jesus was on his way to see her, he was approached by a woman, who, the Bible says, had been suffering with “an issue of blood twelve years.” She approached Jesus from behind, touched the border of his garment, and was healed immediately. Yet Jesus didn’t just keep going; he didn’t pass by her on the way to his prior appointment. He was, at all times, convinced of God’s all-presence and universal goodness.
If we regularly listen for divine prompting and inspiration, then it’s safe to say we’ll have a growing sense of God’s perfect direction in our daily lives.
Rather than this incident hindering the plan to go and heal Jairus’ daughter, the woman presented another opportunity for Jesus to heal. And then afterward he went and raised Jairus’ daughter from death.
The best sense of planning, then, is listening to and obeying the developing unfoldment of Mind, God, which comes to us spiritually, through prayer, and is always harmonious. If our desire for the day is simply to understand and express God’s being, to manifest His spiritual qualities in our moment-by-moment thoughts and actions, we constantly leave the door open for God’s plan to present the right way forward for us.
If we pray regularly to understand that we are the manifestation of divine Mind, expressing Mind’s right activity—and if we listen for divine prompting and inspiration—then it’s safe to say we’ll have a growing sense of God’s perfect direction in our daily lives. But if we find ourselves ruminating about the future, then we’re probably not understanding our oneness with God and listening for His guidance. If we put too much trust in our own plan instead of God’s unfoldment, we may end up planning for something so much less good and wonderful than what divine Love already has in store for us.
Anything conceived according to merely mortal logic is bound to be lacking something of God’s promise. So, we need to rise above this mortal logic. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy tells us, “Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts” (p. 261). Doing that is how we allow God’s wonderfully good plan to come into our daily lives.
Some years ago I found myself a widower after 30 years of felicity in marriage. After lifting my thoughts above the void I felt, I came to see that those 30 years had in fact been full of moments in which my wife and I had listened for God’s unfolding plan for ourselves, each other, and the world. Mrs. Eddy’s words, “Stately Science pauses not …” (Science and Health, p. 566), came to be my constant reminder that in my “new life,” as in the past, God’s plan is always unfolding.
It wasn’t long before I began to think about a new plan for my life. I was so sure of this plan that I called my children together to tell them they didn’t need to have any concern for me: I was going to begin a new life based on a long-held personal desire. But I was praying all the while, doing my best to hold my thought “to the enduring, the good, and the true,” and apparently God had another plan for me.
A short while later I was telling my children that I was getting remarried because the most wonderful woman had come into my life. And the years since then have proven to be very happy and fulfilling for my new wife and our combined families as well as for me and our friends.
When we listen to divine inspiration, our lives are blessed with a deep, spiritual goodness that leaves us grateful each day for God’s perpetual unfoldment. This is described in Hymn 20 in the Christian Science Hymnal:
True to our God whose name is Love,
We shall fulfill our Father’s plan;
For true means true to God above,
To self, and to our fellow-man. (Kate L. Colby, adapted)
