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Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Matthew 6:34
I am not going to say planning is a waste of time. Of course it isn’t. But guard your heart, because it can be pure disobedience! So often our idea of planning, or even more grandly, our strategic planning, is just another way that we manage to try to worry about tomorrow. There is almost something comic about the way Jesus puts it. You have got enough trouble on a daily basis and Christ is practically promising you that. Here is what I think is the most basic reality of it all. Which of you, by planning anything, has kept yourself from sinning? It is humiliating when you consider it. Not one of us, by any plan that we can forge or implement, can keep ourselves from sinning in the most ordinary and practical ways every day! So when is planning not disobedient? When it begins out of prayer and faith, with hope in our God; when it is born out of love for Him and is authored by the Holy Spirit present with us. Then our hope is in Him, and not at all in our ridiculous plans. We begin with surrender and no control, and then we are ready to plan, or should I say, submit our requests to our God! I suppose, in a funny sort of way, that good planning is, in the end, just that. A rather detailed form of prayer request. I will tell you this, I will hope for much from such plans. Go now to your Father in heaven about today, tomorrow, and the next day! They all belong to Him.