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Plans Change
from January 2021
Gò0dNews for Everyone
Plans Change
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by Angie Bishop Forsyth
We all make plans in our lifetimes. As children, we plan to get through school, start a career, and maybe get married and have a family. We also make plans daily, and all go with the expectations that those plans will be carried out just as we imagined them. But what if we were born and knew from the start, as Jesus did, the plans the whole time?
My guess is we’d try to outrun those plans, especially knowing the outcome could be painful and hard. Let’s take a look at how plans changed for Jesus’s family from what they themselves thought it would be. Take Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father. Joseph had plans to marry the love of his life, Mary. Imagine the shock he got when, during the courtship, Mary came and told him she was with child and how the angel of the Lord came to him and backed up that truth. That changed the whole course of Joseph’s plan, and near the end of his life, he knew that what he had imagined as a simple life—with the small-town existence and normal family—never materialized, but instead, his life was much harder than and different from what he planned.
And how about Jesus’s aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Zechariah? They were a couple who could see a future together with a house full of children, but it didn’t quite play out as they had planned. Years kept passing, and no children came, but heartache, despair, and doubt did, until one day, God blessed them with a son named John the Baptist. The two found joy in John but never planned life to go the way it did. As John grew into a man, his plan in life was to serve and baptize those in Jesus’s name. John, Jesus’s cousin, never planned to suffer and lose his life for that very cause.
Then we have James, Jesus’s brother, a boy who loved his older brother and planned out a life alongside him doing brotherly things. James couldn’t wrap his head around Jesus one day going off the deep end, claiming to be the Messiah. What? That wasn’t right! And their precious mother, Mary, who from the very beginning never planned on birthing the Savior of the world, much less having to watch him suffer and die for it: this whole entire family of Jesus’s had dreams and plans, yet life for all them went drastically differently!
Though different from what they had planned, they all experienced a life that was richer. In my own experiences in life, I too have made plans. Some have gone according to my plan, but many have gone astray. I realize in those that have gone very differently than what I had planned, I see God had His own plan the entire time: a plan in shaping and making me into who He wants me to be. And like the family of Jesus, I endured hardships, suffering, doubt, and despair, but like the family of Jesus, I also got to experience a richer, fuller life in Christ, my Savior and friend, who has had His own plan from which He has never wavered. I’ll forever praise Him for that!
About The Author My name is Angie Bishop Forsyth. I am a local of Rome, Georgia, now for 30 + years. I’m just a simple lady with heart that chases after God! I love to share about him anywhere I can. To me there’s no one or no thing on this earth, greater to talk about! God has blessed me in tremendous ways and I not only love to tell about it, but I live to tell about it!
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