Life is a Vacation

James 4:13-15

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Last summer, my family and I took a vacation to northern Georgia. We went to a beautiful planned community in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. We had been there before and we knew what sort of amenities they offered that they had a beautiful beach there, manmade lake that was spring fed, and at the beach, on the water there they had so many wonderful things to do, like kayak and paddleboard. They had inflatables for the kids to play on. They even had a couple of hundred foot natural rock slide.

When we got down there, the weather was unseasonably cool for early June. Yet we decided to make the best of it and still went to the beach anyway. Our mouths dropped open, though, when we got there and saw that there was no lake. It was all gone because there was an issue with the dam, so they had to drain the whole thing and it would be months until it was fixed. We were quite disappointed.

Perhaps it’s happened for you that you’ve made plans when it comes to a vacation or a trip, but it hasn’t quite worked out the way that you had hoped. Maybe the same is true, not just for a vacation, but for your life. Maybe you’ve had great plans concerning what career you want to do. Maybe hopes and dreams for finding the perfect spouse. Or maybe settling down and having a family with X number of children. Maybe you look forward to spending years and years of retirement, enjoying all of the wealth that you accumulated over the course of your lifetime.

How have those plans worked out for you? There’s individuals that maybe had to drop out of school in order to make ends meet for them and their family, other individuals that never found the right person to marry, or maybe they didn’t get married and it ended up in divorce. Maybe those kids that they’d hoped for never came. Or maybe they turned out to be rebellious and turned against you. Or maybe sickness and disease or accident, injury, death, maybe came and threw off all of your plans that you had for life or even retirement. You know, when it comes to planning, God really instructs us in his word and James chapter 4 when he tells us this

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into this or that city, spend a year there, do business, and make a profit.” You do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? Indeed, it is a mist that appears for a little while and then disappears. Instead, it is better for you to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live, and we will do this or that.” (James 4:13-15)

It’s a good reminder to us that for all the planning that we can do, we aren’t in control, are we? But we know the one who is. We know that God is in control of all things and that he even knows the future. We can trust God’s will. We might wonder, though, what is God’s will for us, what is God’s will for the future? Well, the Bible tells us plainly, it is God’s will that you be sanctified. It’s God’s desire that each and every one of us be holy and live holy lives. It certainly isn’t God’s will or plan for us to sin. But we also know, as it says, in scripture, God, our Savior wants all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. We know that God wants us to know his word, to know his truth better. We know that it’s God’s plan for us to be with him forever one day in heaven. We know that he’s carrying out that plan even now, even at times when we don’t understand how it could possibly be.

You know, when it came to that trip with my family down in northern Georgia, things didn’t work out the way that we expected. In fact, we ended up having to spend more time together back in the cabin. Ended up being an enjoyable vacation, though, as we spend more time with one another and we also maybe had a bit more rest and relaxation than we would have had if we would have been running around just like we had planned. So too, we can make many plans when it comes to this life, when we can trust that God’s will for us is good and that God is carrying out his plan to bring us to be with him forever in heaven. So make your plans, make your hopes and dreams for the future, have them. But also pray that God’s will be done and trust that his will for you is good. Amen.