the big red planner

I know my way around a computer, but I'm not the world's most high-tech person. You may laugh that I still use an old-fashioned planner (a diary to my UK friends) that consists of pens and paper and writing things down by hand... but you'd laugh even harder if you knew the number of times I forgot to charge my old PDA and lost my entire schedule and address book! No, these big red books I carry around each year, with the year stamped in gold on the spine and cover, work much better for me. I actually look forward to getting my new planner every October, and slowly filling in my activities for the year -- few of you would be surprised to know that all my entries are color-coded, too...

The ritual of filling out my new planner each year always begins with a purple pen and a printout of the Arizona Diamondbacks season schedule. That's right, I put every home and away game right into my planner. (Go ahead and laugh, you Rockies fans...) Then it's a green pen for my annual bagpipe competitions and Scottish festivals, a light blue pen for choir practices, a pink pen for my women's bible study, an orange pen for my World Vision sponsorship commitments... the list goes on. Birthdays, holidays, paydays, laundry days... everything goes into that planner. And the older I get, the more colors I find myself using. It's crazy, but it works for me. And once the new year begins, I open the pages of that new planner and enjoy how orderly and purposeful my life looks... a well-planned, widescreen, Technicolor marvel.

But it never stays that way for long! Who of us can ever plan our lives a year in advance, and not have our plans change? Oh, the best-laid plans of mice and men!

Thing is, with the PDA, if my plans happened to change, I could simply erase a cancelled appointment or move it to a new day and voila! It was all still perfect and neatly organized. My life was still orderly, according to the little screen in the palm of my hand. No one ever had to know that the Diamondbacks were originally scheduled to play at 1:05pm but that the ESPN coverage moved the first pitch to 1:35.

With this big red planner, however, when something gets cancelled or changed, I have to cross it out and rewrite it. There's no hiding the mistakes, no way to keep up the appearance of a neat and orderly life. I've tried white-out, but all that produced was a really nasty headache and a lingering acrid odor. And as I looked at my planner last night and all the changes I'm already having to make this year (and it's barely February!), I even entertained the thought of buying a new one and starting over.

But then it hit me -- my life is never going to be perfect. So why waste so much effort at pretending? On the contrary, I should be glad that my plans for my life are falling through. How dull my life and its big red planner would be if it was always perfect and orderly -- especially if it was only full of my plans. God's plans are so much more exciting! The very fact that I'm now living in Colorado proves that. I should be glad to be crossing out my plans and replacing them with His! And I should be glad to look back through all these scribbled pages and see the places where He foiled my attempts to control my own life. It means that He loves me too much to let me have my own way! So no more white-out for me, no starting over... because it's not my big red planner. It's His.