Let me tell you about my disaster of a day I endured not so long ago. I had multiple plans that incorporated things at work, needs of family as well as personal activities and not many of them went according to the plans I had in place.

It started once I arrived at work and headed into the prison to meet with one of the guys at a time I had booked the previous week. I spoke with the officer who is responsible for calling them to be brought to the meeting room and then proceeded to wait. I heard him being called over the loudspeaker multiple times and after 20 minutes the officer informed me that as he hadn’t appeared it amounted to our visit being cancelled.

No big deal. This is not an uncommon occurrence. You chalk it up to part of prison chaplaincy life and you move onto the next visit, which I did.

When I arrived at the next unit and asked for the person for my pre-arranged appointment I discover that this gentleman had chosen to take the opportunity to go out to the yard. I don’t get too annoyed when the guys choose to spend time outside instead of inside in a room talking to me, but it was another of my planned activities that didn’t proceed as planned.

Four members of the chaplaincy team and I had a meeting scheduled together at 11am and I had made plans accordingly. However, one of the team had tested positive for Covid and wouldn’t be in attendance, another had an emergency appointment and was called away and a third member was feeling poorly and left early. The decision was made to reschedule this meeting for the following Monday.

My Aunt is in hospital recovering from surgery and I have been visiting her almost every day. The plan for this day was to pick up my son from school at 2:15pm and then we would drive the 20 minutes to visit her in the hospital.

As I was leaving prison and collected my phone I discover a message from her that she would be moving to a different facility at some point during the day. A call to the ward indicated that her ambulance transport to this new location was booked for the exact time I had planned to visit her. This threw my plan awry, so I sent my Aunt a text message saying I would wait until about 4pm and then come and find her in the new hospital.

I headed off to collect my son, and as we were driving home, which is in the opposite direction to the hospital, I receive a reply from my Aunt that says I still need to come to the first hospital to collect the flowers that she had received since being in hospital as the ambulance won’t transport them.

So, new plan. I will drop my son home and then turn around and head to the hospital to become a flower courier to the new hospital. This is now about 2:45pm and I had been driving for 10 minutes when my car notified me I had a new message which I asked it to read to me. I am glad I did as it turns out the ambulance staff were happy to bring the flowers along for the ride and so I needed another new plan!

I head back home to wait for about an hour before trying to find my Aunt in her new location, expecting that it would give her enough time to be settled in. The new hospital is only about 12 minutes from home, instead of the 25 minutes the previous hospital was. I decided to call the new hospital as I was driving there to find which ward she was in.

Great idea, except that at 4pm her paperwork had not yet been entered into the system and so the operator could not tell me which of the 5 possible wards she was in and suggested I call back in an hour and I might have more luck. Only problem with that was at 5pm I needed to be preparing dinner so that we could eat and then head out for my son’s basketball game.

Yet again, I turned the car around, abandoning this ever-morphing plan and feeling super frustrated. I message my disappointed Aunt that I wouldn’t get to see her today, but there’s always tomorrow. At the suggestion of my husband, I take some time to reflect on what I could possibly learn from my experiences on this day, annoying though they were.

If I focussed on the amount of plans that slipped through my fingers I would end up in a place of annoyance and possibly anger. After all, I have multiple balls to juggle and I had given consideration to how they would work well together on this day, but it was as if no one else realised and made allowances for that.

Yet none of the plan changes resulted in anything more than an inconvenience for me, and a fair bit of turning the car around mid-journey! When I realise this it helps me release the negative thoughts I was experiencing were based on a sense of my own self-importance.

Having plans for our days and lives is a perfectly acceptable practice as long as we acknowledge they need to be held with loose fingers. Ultimately it is helpful to remember that we actually have little control over most things apart from ourselves and our own behaviour.

For me, I find it helpful to remember that God is in control of my life, no matter what plans I may make. My experience is that when I follow His plan, my life is better. In Proverbs chapter 19 verse 21 it reads, “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.”

So this frustrating plan-fluid day reminded me that I am not as important as I like to think I am and it’s okay when things don’t turn out as expected, I’ll just turn the car around!

Be blessed.