Sermon 41 - Plans, recidivus
Proverbs 19:21 - Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.
Jeremiah 29:11 - For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
I wrote my first sermon during a whole bunch of boring sermons that I didn't really listen to over the years. I've written other, subsequent, sermons during other boring services. Recently I sat through a really, *really* boring sermon, and thought that it was so bad that I could do a better job, based on any story at all, and still come up with a better sermon. The first story I thought of was our wedding. Gloria's and mine.
So I'm going to tell you the story, or stories, of our wedding. And, don't worry. There is a point to all of this.
I had not, actually, given up on being married by the time I did get married. Mind you, there was no particular reason for me not to have given up on the idea. I have never had a girlfriend. I mean, during elementary school not many people do. But then I had never had a girlfriend in high school. I had never had a girlfriend in university. And I spent longer there than most people do. I had tried at getting girlfriends after I got out of university, and was starting into the workforce, and was always very gently turned down with the idea that we should "just be friends." So, it would have been quite logical, and reasonable, by the time I was over thirty, to think that there was no possibility of my ever getting a girlfriend, or getting married.
But, for some reason, I still saw my life as fitting into the rather normal game plan. School, get a degree, get a job, get married, have 2.6 kids. Oh, and I also believed that, as a family, we would live in a house. That we owned. And I lived in *Vancouver*. Talk about living in a fantasy world!
But, eventually, there was this woman who agreed that it wouldn't be a terrible idea to marry me. She wasn't quite what I might have had in mind in my fantasies of married life. But then, by this time, I had realized that I should probably drop certain of the requirements that I might have initially had, and was down to basically would you agree to marry me? And Gloria did agree to marry me. So the wedding was on.
I have lots of stories to tell about our courtship. I have lots of stories to tell about the preparations for our wedding. I suppose I do have to tell some of the stories about the preparation for the wedding. Mostly to do with the guest list.
I was older than most grooms. Gloria was even older than I was. When you are old, you know more people than when you are young. So, we had to choose guests from two rather large churches, a college, an island, and an entire denomination. One of my friends recounted overhearing a conversation where one person asked if the other was going to attend the denominational convention for that year. No, was the reply, but I'm going to The Wedding! The friend recounting this story told us that you could actually hear the capitalization of The Wedding, and knew instantly that The Wedding being referred to was ours.
Even when you are going to choose representatives, and not everybody that you know in all of those areas, it still comes to a pretty significant number. My guess list was no problem. I don't have an awful lot of friends. I chose twenty-five people and turned in my list. (One of our friends has always been very proud of the fact that she was on *my* list, which was a bit more exclusive than the final total of the wedding guests.) Then Gloria had to pick those people that she couldn't not invite, and *her* mother had a list, and *my* mother had a list. All together, these lists totaled 350.
Now, I don't know if you've quite picked up yet on the theme of plans, and expectations. Gloria's father, expecting to pay for the wedding, in the manner of the time when he grew up, was appalled at having to pay for a sit down dinner reception for 350 people. I told him not to worry about that: there was no possible way that we could have a *reception* for 350 people. We weren't even going to have a formal receiving line. Again, that was an expectation that he had for how the wedding and reception would go. Of course you would have a receiving line! I pointed out to him that if we were going to have a receiving line, it couldn't be a serial receiving line. It would have to be a *parallel* receiving line. (He knew something about computers, and the difference between serial and parallel.) That is, the guests would have to choose which person in the wedding party, complete with parents of the couple, they were going to greet, and line up for that person. There was no way we could have a standard serial receiving line. I pointed out to him that, if we did, each of the guests would have about six seconds speaking to anybody. I don't think he really believed my math, but he did understand that this wedding was going to be different from his expectations. He felt a lot better about not having to pay for plated dinners for 350 guests.
The thing was, the guest list continued to grow. So, at one point, Gloria and *her* Mum went to have a meeting with *my* Mom. They needed to trim fifteen people off the guest list. My Mom *added* twenty-five.
Gloria and her Mum became quite worried about such a large wedding. I wasn't worried. Mostly, of course, because I didn't really know anything all that much about weddings. But what I *did* know was that a large number of people were going to come, and, however we planned, things were not going to turn out the way that we planned. But I knew that First Baptist Church in Vancouver would easily hold that number of guests (and many more), and that the reception would be held in Pinder Hall, which is immediately adjacent to the sanctuary, and would also accommodate a large number of people.
In the end, it didn't really matter. As I said, Glory was only able to invite representative samples of people from West Vancouver Baptist Church, where she had attended (and done lots of volunteer work), for decades, and also Regent College, which she, essentially, ran while Carl Armerding, the Principal, ran around the world raising money for the new building. And weddings, being a kind of testimony to the general public, are public events. You don't need an invitation to go to the wedding. You may need an invitation to go to the *reception*, but, in our case, the reception was, literally, right next door. So all kinds of people who haven't been on the official invitation list came, and, when the doors to Pinder Hall were opened, everybody just came in.
There were a lot of people at our wedding. The minister who officiated (I have to mention that, because there were twenty ministers at our wedding), who knew the church well, told us that there were more than five hundred people there. Pretty much everybody came to the reception. There were people at our reception that we didn't know. As a matter of fact, the first name signed into the guest book was that of somebody that nobody in either family knew. It was one of the street people from Vancouver, who, obviously well versed in these things, marched in with everybody else in order to grab a few sandwiches.
Not all of the stories of our wedding day were really funny. One couple who was invited found, when they went out to get the wedding gift that they had brought, that the radio antenna had been broken off their car. Not only that, but the radio antenna had been bent into a kind of fish hook, and used to unlock their car, and the wedding present was now gone.
I watch *way* too many Hallmark movies. Possibly this is because of loneliness from being a grieving widower. Possibly it's just poor taste on my part. I don't know. The thing is that an awful lot of Hallmark movies involve a wedding. Oh, not necessarily the wedding of the principal characters in the movie. Usually the plot line of the story involves a wedding, and possibly one, or other, or even both, of the principal characters in the movie are involved in helping out with the wedding. And, inevitably, at some point, the bride has a meltdown because of a problem and says that she just wanted to have a perfect wedding and was that too much to ask. And I, being a physicist, and knowing how hard it is to achieve perfection in the real world, mutter, under my breath, of course it is. The characters in the movie, of course, all say that yes, they are very much in support of this bride having the absolutely perfectest wedding ever, and, no, it's not too much to ask.
Gloria used to be the wedding hostess at West Van Baptist Church for a number of years. She had dealt with a number of weddings. Some of the weddings were pretty high profile people, whose names you would probably recognize even here and now. She also faced these demands for the perfect wedding. And she always had the same response for those demands. If the wedding was perfect, nobody would ever remember it. The stories that would be told, twenty, and thirty, and forty years later, would all be about the disasters.
And yes, I've only told you a few of the stories about our wedding. I haven't told you about my Dad, who, having agreed to be the photographer, decided, at the last minute, that he wasn't going to be. I won't tell you about how, trying to fill in for my Dad and do my own weddings formal photography, I somehow, even though it was on the list, failed to get a picture of Gloria and her grandmother. I won't tell you about whirling, around, and around, and around, as everybody who wanted to talk to Gloria tapped her on her right shoulder and she would turn, and I would have to turn with her, and that is how we made it through the entire reception. I won't tell you how we didn't get anything to eat at our own reception, and, as we were being driven off to the airport, the only thing that people could find for us to eat was three fragments of finger sandwiches, and two cookies. But you will notice that all of these stories are about disasters, not perfection.
The point being, we have plans, and expectations. But it's God who knows what is going to happen.
In life, we often make plans and have expectations, thinking we're in control. And the Bible tells us to make plans, and make *realistic* plans, and to analyse whether our plans are likely to succeed. The Bible doesn’t condemn planning, but it puts our planning in perspective. We are called to be stewards of our time, energy, and resources. But our plans are subject to God’s will. It tells us to hold our plans lightly, because we don't know the future. God does.
Consider how often life has taken unexpected turns. A job opportunity you didn’t anticipate. I got fired from teaching, and, specifically *because* I got fired, I later was able to teach on six continents. A relationship that came out of nowhere. I didn't expect to marry Gloria. I didn't see marrying anybody *like* Gloria. If you had asked me to list qualifications, factors, and characteristics of who I was going to marry, I wouldn't have described anybody like Gloria. God led me to Gloria. Gloria got me to start writing books. She gave me grandchildren, and now great grandchildren. Gloria allowed me to pursue career paths that got me teaching on six continents.
Now that Gloria has died, I have no plans or purpose that I can see. Various outcomes of her death have started me writing sermons. Is that a good thing? I don't know. I don't know the future, and, right now, I see no purpose in my life. I hate it. But faith demands that I believe that God has a purpose even for this horrible life. So I do what is put in front of me, not knowing where it will lead, or even if it will lead anywhere.
We may chart our course, but God directs our steps. Sometimes our plans fail or take an unexpected turn. That's when we are reminded that we are not in control. God is. Rather than resisting or questioning God's sovereignty, we need to learn to surrender and trust. And that is not always easy. It's easy to say that we should embrace the beauty of God's unexpected paths and find peace in His perfect plan. But when our plans, plans that we worked on and have a vested interest in having succeed, suddenly hit a brick wall, we are probably going to be fixated on them, and will have trouble seeing another path forward.
And that is where faith comes in. *We* have trouble seeing forward. *We* have trouble seeing other paths. But that's on us. God knows the plans that He has for us. And they are plans for our good. But we may have to wait. And be patient. And listen. And have faith. Even if it is not a lot of fun right now.
see also Sermon 23 - Plans
https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/sermon-23-plans.html
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