Responding to advice from the doctor we took a few days off recently and spent the best part of a week with our daughter in Norwich, she currently has two rabbit’s and a guinea pig. I remember the day we first met Lola the rabbit three or four years ago, she was a tiny bundle of fur and was a gift for our grandson “she’ll not grow very big” the lady in the shop had said. Lola is now nudging two feet in length and is larger than some small dogs, over the years she has moved house several times as she has outgrown hutches and is enormous.
It reminds me of the day nearly sixty years ago when my brother and I went with our parents to the RSPCA to select a puppy for our small, terraced house “he’s only got small feet, so he’ll not grow very big” the woman told us. He grew to about the size of a labrador, so consequently I have never entirely trusted the somewhat shaky guarantees some people give when trying to flog the ideal pet.
For years in my business life, I was taught to plan ahead, and I can remember spending hours working on five-year plans, action plans, and critical paths. I can remember one boss whose mantra was “proper preparation prevents poor performance” and I get it, this has become so central to my way of working that it is second nature now. However, I have learned over the years that it is impossible to plan ahead without considering contingency plans if things don’t work out the way we had expected. This is one of the reasons why Covid was so frustrating and caused so much stress, on one single day in March 2020 my full diary emptied, the jobs didn’t go away, but nothing functioned anymore in the way I had planned, and nobody could have planned sufficiently for such an experience.
All of this causes me to think about what happens when I pray. Sometimes when I find my back against the wall and in sheer desperation, I ask for God’s guidance, I can sometimes find myself telling God how I expect him to fix whatever had happened. A local preacher back in Bradford way back in the 1970’s once said in a children’s address that God always answers prayer “sometimes he says yes” he said “and sometimes he says no, and sometimes he says, not yet” I thought that was a wise message.
It has taken a lifetime to come to understand that there is a fourth option when God says, “I have a better idea”. Maybe the lesson in all of this is that the most predicable thing about life is how unpredictable life is. Robert Burns quotes in his poem “the best laid schemes of mice and men can oft go awry” This is why I believe that we need God, to keep us on the right track, to be there to help us pick up the pieces, refocus, and move on in the strength of the Holy Spirit.