But mouse-friend, you are not alone
in proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid plans of Mice and Men
go oft awry,
and leave us only grief and pain,
for promised joy!

(Robert Burns)

In May, I planted two American Persimmon Trees (diospyros virginiana) at the parsonage for my wife as a Mother’s Day present. Jennifer has always wanted persimmon trees. She makes the most amazing persimmon pudding from a recipe given to her from a dear sweet saint in a previous church we served. We’ve talked off and on over the years about having fruit trees in our yard, cherries, apples, peaches, and of course persimmons. But in all our conversations, we ended up coming to the same conclusion; we will do that after we retire, when we are living in our final and permanent home. As an iterant pastor, moving from parsonage to parsonage, it’s just not logical to grow fruit trees. All varieties of fruit trees take years to establish and more years to fruit. American or Common Persimmons take about 5 to 7 years to establish and then usually don’t fruit until about 10 years. You can cut that time down a little, like we did, by getting 3-year-old saplings. But in any case, planting persimmons is a long-term commitment. 

So, when I planted these trees alongside our cherries and blueberries, we were looking far ahead. We were preparing not only the soil, but our hearts and minds to be in this place for at least another 10 years.  In fact, every decision we had been making about how we were structuring our lives we made with the assumption that we would in fact be serving Zion Church for at least the next 10 years and hopefully twice that. We built planter boxes, raised chickens and ducks, and got a milk cow. 

More than that, we planted our lives here. Our eldest daughter went to school in Elizabeth City, so we are situated at a sort of halfway point between her and our extended family back in Greensboro. Our middle daughter is enrolled in the local community college. Our youngest is involved in extracurricular activities in surrounding towns. And, we have been going through an extensive home study with the aim of bringing two adoptive daughters home HERE from Colombia. Our plans are all “here’ plans. We thought about, talked about, and planned as if we would retire from this place.

The Eighteenth-Century Scottish poet, Robert Burn wrote, “The best-laid plans of Mice and Men go oft awry.” For us, humans living our limited lives here on earth, that means that no matter how much, how diligently, or how passionately we map out our own course in life, the best and most well-made plans have a tendency to go sideways. The Bible tells us in Proverbs 19 that “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails” (Prov 19:21 NIV). I feel that, all of that. No matter how much I plan ahead, many times life just refuses to cooperate. On the other hand, no matter how flexible I try to be, sometimes I just get blindsided by life’s twists and turns. That’s the human condition. The best laid plans.

The week after Mother’s Day, the same week I was planting persimmon trees, I got a call from my Stepdad saying they needed to cancel Mother’s Day dinner with my mom. She wasn’t feeling well. Four days later, she was in the ICU on a ventilator and the doctors were asking us if we wanted them to resuscitate in case her heart stopped again. The best laid plans. She spend the next several weeks literally fighting for her life. Off the ventilator, back on the ventilator, on the bi-pap, off the bi-pap. One step forward two steps back. A dance with mortality, a dance on the edge of physical death with a relentless partner. This unfeeling partner kept insisting we dance one more song no matter how exhausted we became. Anyone who has walked with an aging and/or seriously ill parent knows this dance. 

Then! Right in the middle of the running back and forth, the four-hour round trips to Greensboro from Norlina, my wife’s father fell and broke his shoulder. He landed in the same hospital where my mom was. His health had already been declining for the last 6 years since his wife passed away. Don was his wife’s primary caregiver, her sole caregiver, as she battled Parkinson’s for almost 30 years. The fall was more than his frail body could take. He went into an almost catatonic state for days. He developed bed sores in the hospital due to lack of care and attention. The hospital chose not to record the bed sores in his chart or inform the family he had them. Instead, they sent him in that condition to the rehab facility where the nurse discovered them. He declined from there. My mom went home, struggling with congestive heart failure and a host of other ailments. Don died. I buried him. We were broken.

Somewhere in the midst of the running back and forth, the late nights and early mornings, the complaints that I was spending too much time away from church and not ministering well enough to my congregation, dealing with some painful issues among Jennifer’s brothers, the desire to keep Zion focused on its mission to win hearts to Jesus and make disciples, the constant ups and downs of the adoption process, the burden on my heart for these small churches in this area who need guidance as they strive to live into their calling under a new denomination, and the hesitation in my heart every time one of my brothers’ numbers came up on my phone, and the utter exhaustion… a truth emerged. The future I had envisioned was not panning out. The best laid plans.

With that realization, came a thought. “Maybe we need to move back, be closer to our families.” It was just a thought, at first. That thought became an idea, and that became a prayer. “God, what should we do? We are struggling here for direction. What should we do?” I shared that concern with a handful of my collogues at a cabinet retreat of the Leadership of the GMC NC Provisional Annual Conference the first week of June. For the first time, the consideration of moving as even a remote possibility was out there, voiced, and being prayed over. But it was not a plan, not even a fully conceptualized idea, just a prayer request. In my heart, I still had a thousand reasons why we could not, would not move. “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” Those who know me, know that I am the farthest thing from a neo-Calvinist. So, I am not saying that God’s plans and purposes included my mother’s illness, the various difficulties in the adoption process, my father-in-law’s death, or the growing number of folks at Zion who were feeling neglected and/or hurt. No. These are just things that happen in life. The brokenness that is intrinsic to a fallen world. The many ways “the best-laid plans of Mice and Men go oft awry.” Yet, God foreknew all these things would happen. God saw ahead and provided for each and every circumstance. God’s prevenient grace was already charting a path through the storm. God’s plans would prevail! Of that we were completely sure. Yet we were completely unsure of where the path led. We needed to pray for clarity so that we could walk the path that God had laid out. As it turns out, that path is away from Zion and toward our families back home, at least for now.

– More in the next blog

1. Burns, Robert. To a Mouse. 1785 ↩︎