Thoughts for the Day

Boasting about Tomorrow

Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.’ Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.

(Lectionary, New Revised Standard Version)

Thoughts

Are you a person who looks forward or who looks back? Do you look to the future and make plans as to how your life might work out, and is the past simply the past and not thought about? Two members in my family look ahead - to the next move or the next job - and when that doesn't work out they will change their strategies and forge on ahead. But my husband always looked back, and didn't plan for the future. But his memory of the past was amazing. If he went to any strange town, or a central railway station in London, he would recognise someone he had known twenty or thirty years before and strike up a conversation with them. Whereas I, who was busily adapting my plans when yet another job application was rejected, could barely remember the names and places of where I had lived five years earlier.

As we have seen before, the authorship and date of the Epistle of James has over the centuries been disputed. Most theologians have settled on the writer as 'James the Just', that is the brother of Jesus rather than James, the disciple. He was to become one of the leaders of the church in Jerusalem and was killed around 62 CE. His Epistle is wonderfully practical, and today's passage looks at our habit of making large plans for our life and not taking into account the basic fact that we are like "a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes".

There is no problem making plans for the future, indeed it makes practical sense. But in the same way that we evaluate our finances and get a building survey done when we buy a house, or consider our suitability before applying for a new job, so as Christians it might be a good idea to approach God with an attitude of "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that."

Heavenly Father,
forgive our habit of forging ahead
without including You in our plans
and then wondering why things don't work out.
Help us to start from the beginning
to plan each day and each year with You,
remembering to include You at all times.
Then might we have the certainty
of knowing that outcomes might be acceptable to You.
Amen.