Discovering God's Plan for Your Life

Jeremiah writes to people who have just been marched a thousand miles from home, and tells them to build houses. Plant gardens. Marry off your children. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you — the city that took you.

Only after all of that does he say the sentence everyone quotes: I know the plans I have for you. It is not a promise of rescue. It is a promise made to people who have been told to unpack.

The plan is usually the next ordinary thing

We come looking for a plan because we want to know how the story ends. What we are given instead is an instruction for the season we are actually in, and it is nearly always something domestic: build, plant, marry, seek the welfare of the place you did not choose.

• If you are between jobs, the plan this month is the applications and the sleep.
• If you are newly bereaved, the plan is eating and answering the phone.
• If you are waiting on a diagnosis, the plan is not the diagnosis. It is today.

Two questions worth more than “what is my calling?”

Who is in front of me? Vocation in scripture is almost always described in terms of people, not of roles. Moses is sent to a nation, not to a job title.

What can I not stop noticing? The thing you keep seeing that others walk past is more reliable evidence of a call than any feeling of certainty.

Seventy years, Jeremiah says. Most of the exiles who read that letter died in Babylon. The promise was real and it was not for them, and they built the houses anyway.

This week

Write down the next ordinary thing. Not the five-year plan — the thing for Tuesday. Then do it, and see whether anything clarifies by Friday. It usually does, a little.