In control

I made BLTs for dinner last night--I was inspired by the "what's for dinner tonight" feature in our local grocery store. I was so impressed with myself for actually cooking a meal for the family while Hubby was out of town. Everything was going well: I put Logo in charge of cutting the tomatoes and Code-man was handling the toast. Everything was well in control, and then, I realized I had forgotten to put the grease catcher onto the griddle and the bacon grease was pouring out onto the top of the stove. The gas stove, of course! Ug.

How many times in our lives do we think everything's going well, everything's well in control and then we realize it's not? I think the flaw in our thinking is that we think we have everything under control. When you think about it, how much in our lives is really in our control? Not a whole lot. We can only control our reaction to our circumstances, not the circumstances themselves.

In the past few months I've had two friends comment to me that while life is good, they'd been having emotional difficulties because it just wasn't what they had envisioned. We all do that: we dream and set goals and think, next week, next month, next year, next decade, this is what I'm going to be doing, what my life will look like. And that is for sure not a bad thing to do. I'm sure we've all heard that saying, "if you aim at nothing, you're sure to hit it." The problem comes when we shift from knowing that God is in control to thinking that we are, that we can be. And after we make that shift, we start to put our confidence in our plans, rather than where it should be, in the loving hands and loving plans of God.

The earth is the Lord's, and all its fullness, The world and those who dwell therein.

Psalm 24:1