The Best Laid Plans

          How often have you had everything figured out only to have your plans go terribly haywire? Life would be simpler if we could be absolutely certain how our every decision would turn out. The Holy Spirit provides direction for life, but His instructions are rarely all encompassing. There is always an element of faith involved in which we must trust God with the details.

          The scripture says, “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.” God points the way, but He doesn’t always alert us ahead of time to specifics that await us along the way. In fact, the challenges along the way will often make us wonder if we heard the direction clearly in the first place.

          Forty years of experience doesn’t necessarily make following God easier. Recently, after serious prayer, I made the decision to apply for a permanent job and settle down in the desert. To survive the heat, I invested $55,000 in an all season RV. The manager of my unit was happy to hear I wanted to stay and helped the application along. Everything was going as expected.

  

        The hospital’s best offer was, in essence, their minimum wage for a beginning nurse (a $20,000 a year cut). I felt like I’d been slapped in the face. Adding insult to injury, management refused to negotiate because they had already made such a great offer.

          Was this God’s direction? Did He mean for me to work for less than the total of my bills? Or did I make a horrible mistake in interpretation? You can bet my countenance fell.

          I reapplied to all the positions on the same job announcement. Lawton HIS called with an even lower offer. But, what about that RV? We were sure that God wanted us to buy it. Were we wrong?

          Hopi IHS called to interview me for a position there. A week later, they called with an offer---a good offer with a $9,000 signing bonus. We left Hopi a year earlier because we didn’t have a RV capable of spending the winter there. We traveled to Hopi to check out their RV park and talk to HR. The RV park was closed and we were told we could not park our RV in the yard or hospital housing. It was another dead end. I walked in to tell the people at HR that I was declining their offer.

          Without preamble, they upped their offer to my present salary, a 14,000 sign on bonus and permission to park our RV next to our house. Never, in all my life have I received a job offer that was everything I wanted. Perhaps the Hopi Project is not over after all. Whether that’s true or not, I’m sure of one thing—God knows.

“Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.”