The Winning Plan

In the 1998 classic business allegory, "Who Moved My Cheese?", two mice, Sniff and Scurry along with two little people, Hem and Haw, live in a maze in which they find a corridor filled with cheese.  While they become dependent on the cheese in a particular corridor of the maze in which they live, the cheese isn't there one day.  They no longer can rely on what they have come to rely.

The book was a tremendous success.  It was on the top of the charts for four years, selling 25 million copies and still remains a widely used book in business training because it deals with a reality all of us encounter: "The best laid plans of mice and men..."  You know the rest.  Our plans just don't always work out and they never can be trusted to endure forever.

We can, and I think should, make plans - plans for college, plans for employment, plans for family and plans for retirement; plans of all kinds.  But we need to humbly accept the fact that our plans are not guaranteed to succeed.  In fact, life is more often about a well executed plan B than holding on to plan A.  And even plan B can be reduced to ashes in a moment.

The simple truth is that despite our well intentioned, well founded and well executed plans, life just doesn't always play ball.  Sometimes life takes its ball and goes home, leaving you holding the bag instead of advancing to the next base.

Suddenly, you realize that you are not in control, that your plan is not going to pan out.  You can get bogged down in that reality either continuing too double down on your plan, try to devise a new plan or you could yield to the fact that you are not in control and turn to the One who is.  For, while we lack the power to control circumstances, there is One who does not.  As the Scripture says: "Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails" (Prov 19:21).

This realization and the willingness to trust in God over self is the winning plan.  You can make all the plans you want, realizing that when they do not succeed, you are not undone but simply redirected.  As plan A or B or C gets set to the side, you can trust that God is still in control and that he will indeed "Work all things to the good of those that love the Lord" (Rom 8:28).   Jus' Say'n.