On Planning:

Between Faith & The Future

Fear is not what it used to be.

You would think that after years of feeling the drop in my gut when I am asked to be on stage, or the heat on my back when I am walking a quiet road at night, I would at least suspect the faintness that comes every time I thought about a five-year plan or one of its relatives.

But I didn’t.

The instant resentment and frustration bubbling inside me at the mere thought were so engaging that it took a while to see my aversion for what it really was: fear of reckoning with the fact that I did not have what it took to be who I wanted to be.

Thinking about it now, weeks after writing the darn plan, it seems quite silly.

At the time though, I had thought on and on about predestination and how God had a plan for me that I did not know and could obviously not plan for. I considered the fact that the future was unknown and anything could happen. I thought deeply about the will of God and how I did not want to go against it with my blasphemous little plans.

But I wrote it anyway.

I used what was left of my thinking power after arguing with myself to write out where I hoped to be and what I hoped to achieve with all the work and projects I have been doing, five years from now. After that, I wrote out ways I could achieve those things and—because we are practical down here—thought of little ways I could change my daily routine to become the kind of person who could realistically pursue those goals without feeling the need to take myself out to the shed and pump lead into my head.

It is still a work in progress, to be honest. Some “how to achieve this” columns are still empty because I genuinely don’t know how. Some things still need to be taken out of my head and put on paper. But the exercise itself was immensely rewarding.

Around the same time, I ran a small survey asking how faith interacts with people’s planning, ambition, and sense of control over their lives. Only eleven people responded, but the patterns were interesting.

Almost everyone believed strongly in God or a divine higher power. Most people planned fairly often, described themselves as ambitious, and took near-total responsibility for their failures. At the same time, many credited God for unexpected success and believed that life unfolds according to a reason beyond them.

Which is to say: I am not special.

Most of us seem to live in this strange middle space. We believe God guides our lives, yet we feel responsible for outcomes. We plan, but nervously. We work hard, but we leave room for “meant to be.” The future, for most respondents, was neither something fully discovered nor something fully invented, but something to be built in alignment with what God is already doing.

That recognition made my own resistance clearer. My problem was not planning. It was what I thought planning meant.

However, those ideas have since been informed. This is what I think now:

1. Planning is more about clarity and responsibility than ambition.
   My assumptions about what long-term plans were supposed to look like ruined my disposition towards them. I thought planning would be about vanity metrics—titles, numbers, milestones that look good from the outside. Instead, it forced me to think about what I want to achieve for the people I serve. Where I believe the work God has given me should go. How I can best show up to lead us there. Less spectacle. More stewardship.

2. Planning is as much about directing the present as it is about designing the future. Maybe more so.
   Every good plan points to a future goal. But it also quietly reveals how present resources—time, energy, attention—are being distributed. In theory, planning looks like future-thinking. In practice, it is present discipline.

3. It’s okay if your plan makes you laugh.
   Recognition of the divine often comes from holding up human limitation against a more excellent vision. Big plans are usually plans that assume help—help from growth, help from others, help from something and Someone beyond our current capacity. They leave room for becoming. They leave room for God.

4. Plans are strong suggestions, not the law.
   Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So it is with plans. They are temporary tools for direction, meant to serve life, not dominate it. They can be revised, discarded, or reoriented as understanding deepens and circumstances change.

Faith does not cancel responsibility. And responsibility does not compete with trust. It is balance that we learn to walk as we recognise that planning, it turns out, was never the opposite of faith but a discipline of it.

And that sometimes, nothing says “I believe” like surrendering your life in pursuit of your big, hairy, audacious goals.

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Dear OTN Reader,

I am completing this by 8:07PM. Was harder to write than I thought. Crossover Service is in a few hours and one of the people I will be giving thanks for is you.

Thank you for being a part of this journey. See you in the new year, yes?