Living Plan B and Discovering Plan A

One of the things I want to do with this blog is write about what I'm reading.  For those of you who know me well, I love books and usually am reading several at one time.  Well I finished a good one this morning by Pete Wilson, Plan B "What to do when God doesn't show up the way you thought He would?" (Thomas Nelson). It's not that I actually felt God wasn't showing up to my expectation when I lost my job, but it certainly was a Plan B type of situation especially as the primary bread winner. 

Pete is a pastor in Tennessee and what I thoroughly enjoyed was how pastoral he was in writing this book. My copy is filled with pencil marks underlining favorite passages that are good reminders of truth. One of my quirks about books and authors is that I ofter check out the references in a book before buying. I like seeing who influenced the writer and in this case, Pete and I share a fondness for similar writers - Nouwen, Batterson, Yancey, McManus, Kidd - so I expected to like the book.  And I did. 

Here are a few excerpts:
"Your dreams may not be happening, and things aren't turning out the way you expected, but that doesn't mean your life is spinning out of control. It just means you're not in control." p.22

"Our fears establish the limits of our life." (Erwin McManus) p.55

"Just because God calls you to some venture, that doesn't guarantee the venture will succeed. Just because life doesn't turn out the way you thought, that doesn't mean you missed God's will. And here's something else we often misunderstand about God's will: it's as much about the person we're becoming as it is about where we're going." p.79

"In the end our worship, our idolatry, is more about what we do than what we say. And I think for those of us in the midst of a Plan B we'll discover that one of our idols all along has been a picture of the way life should be. Our idol was an expectation or a dream...Plan B situations expose the idols we are chasing. We must be willing, if necessary, to abandon the life we've planned and dreamed of in order to receive the life that our God has authored for us." p. 155, 157

"You've got to stop looking at your shattered dreams and your unmet expectations as something God is doing to you. He's not doing something to you. But he might be doing something through you. He might be doing something in you...In other words, trusting God does not mean God shows up for you exactly the way you thought he was going to show up. Trusting God doesn't mean his timing is going to be your timing." p. 186, 187

I am enjoying this season of learning and that what I thought was a Plan B is really a pretty awesome Plan A reality.