If we have learned in the last couple years, it’s that often things don’t go as we plan. While we should have known — and probably did in smaller ways — this truth before 2020, a worldwide pandemic surely sealed our knowledge.
But I’ve also learned a second truth: Letting go of our plans can be OK. In fact, sometimes our plans aren’t as great as we think they would be.
This thought came about after reading a couple chapters of a book I recently picked up.
Sometime last year, a new title caught my eye: “Letters to Myself from the End of the World.” How appropriate! Written by Emily Stimpson Chapman, who I’ve followed a bit in recent years, I was eager to get my hands on a copy. So, last month, I finally broke down and clicked “purchase.”
While I’m only a couple chapters in, I already know I will thoroughly enjoy each page. Written in the form of letters to Chapman’s younger self, the book addresses the issues of holiness, the Church, responding to injustice, the feminine genius, social media, motherhood, prayer and the last things. But I haven’t even gotten there yet. While I typically binge-read books, I decided — with Chapman’s advice in the introduction — to take it slow and give each of the 45 letters — one for every year of her life — the reflection they deserve.
There is much that resonated with me in the opening chapters — such as what it feels like when the world “as I’ve always known it” ends — but I want to focus on what she wrote about holiness.
At one point in her second letter — after sharing how, for a long time, she had been angry at God for “not meeting my desires on my timeline” — she shares this reflection: “I’d gotten it wrong from the start, though. [It] wasn’t about God saying yes to my plans. It wasn’t about Him endorsing my idea for what a fruitful and holy life looked like. It was me saying yes to his plans. It was me handing Him the reins of my life. He knew the direction I needed to go. He knew what I most needed to grow closer to Him. … We come to Jesus with our tightly held plans, and as soon as we say yes to Him, He starts prying our fingers off those plans, one by one.”
How often do we think we know what it takes to be holy? Or, how often do we share our plans with God and tell him, “This is what will make me happiest,” but we leave out the question of whether it will truly sanctify our lives?
The timeline for my life hasn’t gone quite to my Plan A. Yours, likely, hasn’t either. But if I have learned anything — which Chapman certainly has — it’s that Plan A is sub-par once you see God’s plan for your life and, ultimately, how he is calling you back to him.
One more excerpt from Chapman: “If you want to be a saint, expect to be confounded. Expect to be surprised. Expect the journey to look nothing like you thought it would. Your plans will be upended. The route will have more twists and hills than anticipated. You won’t understand what God is doing. You won’t see what’s coming.
“You don’t have to see, though. He does. He always has. Before the world was made, God saw it all. Now, in time, He’s always there, working through every circumstance in your life to lead you closer to Him.”
Lent is a few weeks away, and it is a natural time to pause and reflect on the disposition of our hearts. Are we truly striving for sainthood, no matter what it takes? Or are we trying to conform God’s will to ours, convinced that we know better than he what it takes to make us holy?
Let’s unclench our fists this Lent. So much is out of our hands. But our hearts are not. And it is through hearts that the Lord changes the world.
Ava Lalor is assistant editor for Our Sunday Visitor and editor for Radiant magazine.
