Living Like We’re Not in Control

Char and I lived through the death of a dream lately. Something big didn’t turn out the way we always thought it would.

Here’s the crazy part. It’s almost like we expected things to turn out the way we’d hoped. We imagined the future, and then considered ourselves entitled to what we’d dreamed.

We do this all the time. I catch myself thinking about what it will be like to write my next book, to move into our next building as a church, to pay off our mortgage, to retire, to grow old with my wife. I’ve pictured in advance how I expect my life to unfold.

I live like I’m in control of the future. The reality: I’m not in control, nor am I entitled to the future I’ve imagined.

We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Will Bring

James reminds us of an important truth:

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’ — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring” (James 4:13-14)

For most of life, it seems like we know what tomorrow will bring. We schedule appointments, plan projects, book vacations and presume they will happen. I’m surprised how often our plans work out.

But James reminds us that nobody really knows what will happen tomorrow. Planning is okay; what’s wrong is thinking that we’re entitled to what we’ve planned, or that we’re able to determine what is going to happen to us.

Plan, but plan with the awareness that you have no idea what tomorrow may bring. Our best plans are provisional.

We’re Mist

James hits us with another truth: we’re mist. “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes,” he writes (James 4:14).

We’re like the steam from a shower: there, and then gone. Illness, accidents, aging, or the return of Christ will end our lives quicker than we think. As Ann Lamott says, “A hundred years from now? All new people.”

If our lives are this insignificant and short, how dare we think we’re in control of the future?

The Answer: Not Despair, but Submission

James says that we’re unaware of what tomorrow brings, and that our lives are too insignificant and short to think we can control the future.

I’d be tempted to conclude that our efforts don’t matter. But that’s not where James goes.

“Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that’” (James 4:15). Anything more than that is arrogant.

James isn’t suggesting that we tack on two words — “God willing” — to everything we say. He commands us to take a new posture: to live as if our entire lives are in God’s hands, realizing on a daily basis that we’re not in control.

The events of this year have exposed something in our hearts. We think we have more control than we do. In contrast, the Christian way to live is to acknowledge our ignorance and inability to control life, to presume nothing, to work hard, and to trust the sovereign God who controls all things.

Living this way would make us a lot less entitled, a lot more dependent, and much more aligned with reality. Lord, please teach me to live like this.