best laid plans

 Today in the One Year Bible, we read from Jeremiah 19:1-21:14. God tells us in this selection that He "will upset the careful plans of Judah and Jerusalem." This reminds me of the old Yiddish saying, "Mann tracht, und Gott lacht," which means man plans, and God laughs.

2020 is definitely a year when we feel this. We all had plans for this year, and no one planned for it to be the way it is. Oh, in case you're wondering, the picture above is from Robert Burns. He was a Scottish poet in the 18th century. You've probably heard the phrase "of mice and men", since Steinbeck borrowed it for the title of his book. But the phrase comes from a Robert Burns poem in which he says "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley." The translation into modern English says, "often go astray."

Even the plans we have for an afternoon often don't go the way we plan, right? Let alone a whole year? Let alone our lives? We plan one thing and something else usually happens. Often it's fortuitous and we like the new, unplanned version better. Sometimes it's not a happy change, like many of us are seeing in 2020, and we lose loved ones or jobs, we face stress and challenges that we weren't expecting. And it's tempting to think that God is up there laughing at us, like the Yiddish expression says.

But we can take heart in remembering that God is with us every step of the way through 2020. The world seems to have lost its mind. Logic seems to be only tangentially aware that 2020 exists, if at all. But God is still in control. God still loves you more than you can imagine. And God will make it all come out right in the end.

God, thanks for taking care of us when everything gang aft agley.