“For
surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord,
plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”
-
Jeremiah 29:11
Corey
Allen Patrick’s plan was simple: when the right car rolled up to the stop light
at Tim Kemp Drive and Gynerium Drive, he’d get the driver’s attention, approach
the vehicle, and as soon as they rolled the window down to talk he’d forcefully
pull them out of the car, jump in the driver’s seat, and take off. It was a
simple plan, to be sure, but one he’d seen carried out successfully before.
When
the time came to go through with it, things initially went exactly as planned.
A car with a driver and no passengers pulled up to the traffic light, so Patrick
waved his arms and approached it. The driver rolled down the window to see what
he wanted, and Patrick calmly told him: “Get out of the car.” The driver, eyes
wide, hastily rolled up the window, so Patrick smashed it open. Grabbing the
driver by his arm, Patrick started brutally beating him, then yanked him out of
his seat and climbed in himself, leaving the stunned driver lying on the
street.
But
that was when his plan suddenly went awry. Looking down at the dashboard and
gear shift, Patrick realized he’d never seen a car quite like this one. He
fiddled with the gear shift, unsuccessfully trying to put it in drive, but he couldn’t
get it to do what he wanted. Beginning to panic at this unexpected problem, he
looked up at the dashboard and through the windshield he saw a neighbor running
toward the car waving machete. In an instant, Patrick abandoned his plan
altogether, leaping back out of the car and running for his life. Eventually he
was found by police hiding in some nearby tall grass and was arrested for the
attempted carjacking. What had foiled his plan? He had tried to steal an
electric car, which the owner would later say “takes some getting used to,” and
he didn’t know how to drive it.
Sometimes
even your simplest plans for the future are derailed the way Corey Allen
Patrick’s was. We live in a society that expects you to always have a plan: a five-year
plan, a career plan, a retirement plan. But life has a way of making a mockery
of those plans—all it takes is one accident, one unexpected layoff, one word of
bad news from your doctor to render your plans obsolete. No matter how good
your plans are, you can never truly know if things will play out like you
envision them.
For
believers, our comfort comes in the knowledge that, while we don’t know what
our future looks like, God does. Our plans are finite and imperfect, often tinged
with pride and greed, but God’s are not. Even as He did for His people in the days
of Jeremiah, God has a plan for His people today, a plan that may include valleys
of suffering along the way, but that ends in the glory of the New Jerusalem.
When
you place all your hope in your own plans, you are setting yourself up for
inevitable moments of confusion, anger, and hopelessness, times when you’ll
suddenly realize of your future, “I don’t know how to drive this thing.” Better
then to trust God with your future, to seek His will instead of hoping He’ll
bless yours. He may not take you exactly where you hoped to go, but unlike when
you’re in the driver’s seat, you’ll always be sure He knows what He’s doing.
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