Plans

Last week, on my God blessed day off, I wake up to one of those emails you never want to see. It was the bank saying, “hey, we think there might be some fraud going on with your credit card.” I’ve received these in the past, most often when I’ve been travelling. “Your card got used in New Jersey, Colorado, and California all in one day is everything cool?” You say, “yes that was me,” and that’s it. This time however, things were undeniably not cool. Instead of enjoying my day off some jerk dumped a bunch of chores in my lap.

Thankfully, it was all caught early, and it wasn’t as nearly as bad as it could have been. Things were about 90% solved after a few hours of bouncing between websites and phone support. Still, that was not how I wanted to spend my day. There are times in our lives when the day we were expecting gets thrown off the rails immediately. Any number of things can take a day from normal to zero in a flash.

Days like this that remind us that, try as we might, we are not in control. There’s a famous prayer that most of us would benefit spending some time thinking about. Usually associated with recovery programs the serenity prayer says, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

It's that last line that gets so many people caught up: “The wisdom to know the difference.” Psalm 19:21 tells us, “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” Maybe one small intrusion in my life is a wake-up call to do an assessment of my on-line security. Maybe I’m supposed to pay closer attention. Once you get safely to the other side of whatever you’re going through take one small moment to look back and ask, “What could I learn from this?”

And maybe go change some passwords.