James 4:13-17
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it commits sin. James 4:13-17 (NRSVUE)
James is confronting the illusion of control. The heart of the passage: Life is fragile. God is faithful. We can hold our plans loosely and our God tightly.
Nellie bought a planner in early January — the nice one, the one with the thick pages and the gold coil. She bought special pens in several colors that would not bleed through the pages. She sat at her kitchen table and filled the planner with color-coded plans including work goals, travel dates, new ideas, birthdays, deadlines, dreams. Every square was full. It felt productive. It felt responsible. It felt like control.
But by March, the pages started to betray her. The job she thought she’d keep for years shifted unexpectedly. A family member got sick. A trip she’d been excited about was canceled. A new opportunity appeared out of nowhere — something she never would’ve planned but couldn’t ignore. By summer, the planner looked like a battlefield of crossed-out lines, arrows, scribbles, and sticky notes.
In December, she sat down again with that same planner. She flipped through the pages slowly, almost tenderly. And she realized something startling. Most of the things that actually happened were the things she never planned. The things she had written in ink didn’t survive. The things God wrote into her life — the interruptions, the surprises, the detours — those were the things that shaped her.
She picked up a pen and wrote in the margin of the last page: “If the Lord wills.” Not as a sigh of resignation, but as a declaration of peace. Because she finally understood she wasn’t meant to be the architect of her year — only the steward of her days.
James 4:13–17 isn’t anti-planning. It’s anti-presumption. The sin isn’t scheduling — it’s scheduling as if God doesn’t exist.
Questions for Reflection:
- What if I invited God into the calendar before I filled it?
- Where in my life am I writing plans in ink that God may be asking me to hold in pencil?
- How might my days look different if I prayed “If the Lord wills” not as a disclaimer but as a declaration of faith?
Prayer:
Hi God. I know you see every day of my life before I live a single one. You know the paths I cannot predict, the detours I cannot foresee, and the blessings I could never plan. Teach me to leave room in my plans for what you know is best. Help me to trust in you and to remember that in all plans and all detours, you are there with me. Amen.
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