This is your Plan A

This is your Plan A. You may have had a different Plan A when you started this journey. You may have prayed for something different, worked towards a different goal, hoped against all hope that you would not be here.

Now you are here. In this place. You are you. You are the gifts God has given you and the hopes and dreams he has fulfilled—or taken away. This might have been your Plan B, or it might not have been a plan at all. This might be a situation where you said, “No way.”

Yet here you are.

Even if this were your Plan B, it is now your Plan A.

Now would be the perfect time to say, “Suck it up.”

 “Deal with it.”

“Make lemonade out of lemons.”

 “Make the best of it.”

 “Smell the roses.”

“Count your blessings.” 

But every one of these sayings are acting as if Plan B has happened.

This is not Plan B. This is Plan A. 

I dislike what we have made of the word Contentment. Modern day languages has us shrugging and sighing and saying, “Oh well.” But that’s not its original meaning. That’s not sipping the best cup of coffee while you watch the sun rise while seated on a front porch next to your best friend.

That’s not screaming as loud as you ever have as you rush off the top of a waterfall and laugh hysterically once you’ve hit the water at the bottom.

That’s not crying tears of joy as you hug your sister in her wedding dress right before she walks down the aisle.

Contentment has lost its beauty. It’s become Plan B.

Let us pause a moment, lest you hear me saying, “rejoice in all circumstances” to a wounded heart. Lest you hear me encouraging plastic smiles on Sunday morning.

It is okay, it is required, that we grieve, that we mourn. When we’ve lost. When our hearts have been broken. When things are not as they should be or how we wanted them. We are given license to weep.  We are given license to rage. One place of loss, one area of broken heartedness, is when our Plan A is taken away.

And we might not grieve only once. We might grieve more often than others think we should. It might last a few minutes or it might last years. But grieving for loss is possible alongside embracing Plan A.

This is your Plan A. This is the Plan. This is the plan made before time. How small our Ten Year Plan compared to a One Hundred Thousand Year Plan in the hands of someone who has every resource and every power to make that Plan come to pass.

What a Plan. What an amazing Plan. What an original Plan. What a creative, life-changing, incomprehensible Plan.

What if, what if we lived life as if it were our Plan A? What would it be like to have no Plan B life? What if we never shrugged and sighed and said, “oh well” about our lives?

Arthur Abbot, in the movie The Holiday, gives Iris (played by Kate Winslet) a glimpse of her own wonderful life.

Arthur: Iris, in the movies we have leading ladies and we have the best friend. You, I can tell, are a leading lady, but for some reason you are behaving like the best friend.

Iris: You're so right. You're supposed to be the leading lady of your own life, for god's sake! Arthur, I've been going to a therapist for three years, and she's never explained anything to me that well. That was brilliant. Brutal, but brilliant.

This is the brutal but brilliant reality: The Plan B life is a sham. Plan A is real. It is here. It is now.

This is your Plan A.