January 16, 2023
Christians are all about “God’s plan.”
God has a plan for this. God has a plan for that.
If you come up with your own plan, then you’re supposed to spend some time in prayer and make sure it’s actually God’s plan for you instead of something you concocted on your own. One pastor at my old church, when you pitched him some idea for a mission trip or evangelism project, would always ask you, “Is that God’s plan or just a cool desire?”
So what happens when you have a “cool desire” and it turns out to not be God’s plan? Well, what you’re supposed to do is accept it and move on and seek out God’s actual plan for you. But I’ve known some highly motivated Christians throughout my life, and what they’d do instead was work very hard to force God’s plan.
Here are three instances from my time in the Church when I witnessed someone forcing God’s plan.
Having a Baby
I once knew a girl who I’ll call Jane. Jane was a friend of a friend. Like all good church girls, Jane wanted nothing more than to get married and have a family. Over the years she posted dozens of pictures on social media of her with various friends who were pregnant. She’d touch their growing bellies lovingly and have a huge smile on her face and have a long-winded caption about how excited she was for God to be bringing a new life into the world, blah blah blah.
I’d ask my friend who knew Jane well about those pictures. I’d say, “She seems so happy in these pictures, but it must be killing her inside that she isn’t married yet.”
This friend who knew Jane looked at me and said, “You have no idea…”
Anyway, the years go by and Jane gets married to a pastor of a small church and she dutifully begins Instagramming their life together. More years go by and to my surprise there’s no pregnancy announcement of her own.
My friend who knew Jane confided in me that they were struggling to get pregnant. That was sad and unfortunate; I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
A few months later, her own pregnancy announcement came. I could tell it was the picture she’d been waiting to post for years as she watched all her friends get pregnant before her.
“Thank you God for answering our prayers! Thy will be done!”
My friend filled me in on the details that weren’t mentioned in the IG post and that few people knew. They’d struggled so hard to have a baby that they’d resorted to tons of doctor appointments, fertility treatments, and all the rest.
Now, I’m glad we’re at a point in time with our healthcare technology that couples who struggle to have a baby naturally and on their own can be helped to do so. However, I can be a cynical bastard sometimes, and I couldn’t help but say, “She keeps talking about God’s plan. Seems to me like it was God’s plan that they not have a baby and that it was their personal plan to get a bunch of doctors involved to make it happen.”
My friend who knew Jane only shrugged in such a way to suggest that she agreed with me but didn’t want to say anything bad about Jane.
I’m very glad Jane and her husband got the help they needed to have the baby they desperately wanted. However, I think it’s a stretch to call that “God’s plan.” Strong Christians are often wary of procedures, medications, and anything artificial that isn’t directly provided by God. I guess none of that is relevant when it comes to having a baby.
Retiring Near the Family
When I was in college, I worked at a church day camp. The director was an older woman who was the wife of one of the teaching pastors.
One day, during the daily meeting before the kids arrived, she announced to us that she was retiring. She confided in us that she and her husband had been praying for almost a year about where they would move after they retired. She told us that the Lord had revealed to them that they should move to Iowa (or Ohio, or Indiana—one of those states; I don’t remember the exact one).
We were all happy for them. We asked them why the Lord had told them to move to Iowa.
She said their adult children lived there, along with their kids.
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. It’s 100% normal (and common, I think) for elderly people to move closer to their kids and grandkids when they retire. It’s an entirely understandable and normal desire, and it was weird to me why the day camp director had to force the decision through a God-shaped hole.
But I guess when you spend your whole life as a Christian and working in a small Baptist church in the deep south, you get programmed pretty heavily to force everything—even the most normal desires—to be an emanation of “God’s plan.”
Miracle Healing
Later on in college I served as a youth leader for my church. One of the other youth leaders, who I’ll call Dan (not his real name) developed an interest in miracle healing.
When we’d come together for our leadership meetings, he’d talk about miracle healing. He’d discuss the miracle healings he’d seen performed and his own attempts to do it. He even claimed that one of the youth directors had the hearing in one of her ears restored to normal. He created a Facebook group dedicated to miracle healings. He was interested in doing more to teach the youth group kids about miracle healing and having them practice to perform it as a way evangelism.
As he talked about this, I could see the youth directors fidgeting awkwardly in their seats. My eyes bounced back and forth between them and Dan, wondering how they were going to handle this situation. Our church wasn’t charismatic, and therefore didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about or teaching miracle healing. However, I was aware that denying its existence wasn’t the “correct” point of view for a Christian. It was a tricky grey area.
Week after week went on with Dan incessantly talking about miracle healing. The youth directors continued to let him speak without shooting him down, but also not completely engaging him.
After a while, Dan eventually stopped being a youth leader and started attending a more charismatic church. Although I never spoke to him about it, I’m pretty sure he’d decided that our church and youth group wasn’t “souled out” enough and that if they weren’t actively practicing miracle healing then they were denying its existence, and thus weren’t “real Christians.”
As far as I know, Dan never performed a miracle healing.
Conclusion
The intersection between God’s plan and our own normal, natural wants and desires was a tricky area for me when I was a Christian. It was something I thought about a lot during my deconstruction.
I’ve always been a highly motivated person, so I struggled with determining if all the ideas coming through my head were actually “God’s plan” or my own cool desires, as the pastor I mentioned earlier would say. These days, I’m happy to pursue my own ideas and goals without having to check in with God first to see if it’s his plan or not. I know it’s not his plan. It’s mine, and I like it that way.