What's the plan?

Where am I going?
What’s going to happen to me?

Most of us want to have some kind of answer to these questions.

Many of us try to be prudent: we plan, we make preparations, we do the right things, and we get ready for contingencies.

But, ultimately, we do not know what the future will bring. Things happen, and sometimes the logic of events escapes us.

God has a plan, they say, but it is sometimes hard for us to see.

In today’s first reading (Romans 11:29-36), St. Paul descants about the plan of God in these classic, beautiful verses:

Oh, the depth of the riches
and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How inscrutable are his judgments
and how unsearchable his ways!

For who has known the mind of the Lord
or who has been his counselor?
Or who has given him anything
that he may be repaid?

For from him and through him and for him
are all things.
To God be glory forever. Amen.

By the grace of God, we may come to know certain aspects of his plan for our lives and because he gives us free will, we have a certain responsibility in making decisions (even though the relationship between God’s plan and our decisions is a fundamentally mysterious one).

What is more, God’s gift of faith not only gives us insights into God’s plan, it also gives us greater comfort to trust that plan, even when it seems beyond what our minds can grasp.

This trust in God’s plan was expressed most wonderfully by the Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman in his famous verse “Lead, kindly Light”

I do not ask to see
The distant scene—one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
Lead Thou me on!

Life is often uncertain, but God has the plan and we have his gift of faith: to comfort us, to guide us, and to lead us on to him.