The Prayer And The Plan

Yvonne keeps a prayer journal and a planner, and she has never once had them open at the same time.

It is not a rule. Nobody told her to keep them apart. They live in different bags and they get used in different hours and they are written in what she now realizes are two different languages, and in eleven years of keeping both she has never put them side by side on a table.

She did it in February, for no reason she can explain.

And here is what she found, and she has not been able to unfind it.

The journal is full of surrender. It is genuinely beautiful, in places. There are pages in there where she has laid the whole thing down, properly, with tears on the paper, and she was not performing for anybody because nobody has ever read it.

The planner is a fortress.

Every contingency in it. Every fallback. Every quiet arrangement she has made so that if the thing she surrendered on Tuesday actually happens, it will not be able to touch her.

Neither book is a lie. Both of them are her, in her own handwriting, in the same eleven years. She meant the surrender and she meant the fallback, and she could defend either one to you at length and you would find both defenses convincing.

They just do not know about each other.

She sat at that table for a long time and then she said, out loud, to nobody: which one of these is what I actually believe?

Now hear me before anybody starts flogging themselves, because I can feel it starting and I am putting a stop to it right now.

Yvonne is not a hypocrite. Nothing in that journal is fake. A woman who cries on a page in an empty house at eleven at night is not performing, and anybody who tells her that her prayers were insincere because she also has a fallback plan is talking foolishness and doing damage.

And she is not a coward for the planner either. Half the people she loves are still upright because that woman planned. There are households standing today because Yvonne wrote things down in a book and thought about what could go wrong.

That is not the problem.

The problem is that she has been running two systems, and only one of them has ever actually been in charge, and the whole cost of the arrangement has been the work of keeping them from ever meeting.

You have your own version. There is a thing you pray and a thing you have arranged, and if somebody laid them out on one table you would not immediately be able to say which one you actually live by.

Nobody is calling you fake. Not one word of this is that.

You are just tired, and now you know from what.

He does not call it hard. He calls it impossible.

Everybody knows this one and hardly anybody hears the force of it.

No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.Luke 16:13

Cannot. Not should not. Not it is a struggle. Cannot, which is the language you use about a thing that does not exist rather than a thing that is difficult.

And that is the most freeing sentence in this whole message, so let me put it plainly. You have not been giving God half. Nobody ever has, because half is not on the menu. One of the two has been deciding all along, and the other has been receiving beautiful words, and the exhausting part was never the division.

The exhausting part was the keeping apart. It was the two bags. It was eleven years of never putting them on the same table, which is not a small piece of work, and you have been doing it in your sleep.

And hear what is already true of you. You are not divided at the root. That is not my encouragement: the written word says God gives one heart and one way to those who are His, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman sitting at a table in February with two books open.

And the surrender in that journal was real. God received every word of it. He does not treat a prayer as void because a fallback exists. He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, says the word, and the Spirit was on every one of those pages and was not once insulted by the other bag.

Nobody is coming for your planner

Now I am going to be very plain, because this is the exact paragraph where a message like this tells a sensible woman to burn her contingency plans and call it faith, and I have watched that wreck people.

Nobody here is telling you to stop planning. Do not throw that book away. Jesus praised a man for counting the cost before he built and warned about the one who did not, so planning is not the rival, and if I told you that a fallback proves you do not trust God I would be talking nonsense.

Nobody is telling you that having less would make you holier, either. That error does exactly as much harm as prosperity does, and from the other side. A woman with a full account is not further from God than a woman with an empty one. The amount was never the subject.

The question is not whether you plan.

The question is which of the two has been telling you who you are, because one of them has, and the arrangement where they both do has never existed anywhere in the world.

And you already belong to one Master. Not once the books agree: the word says you are not your own, you were bought at a price, and it is the Spirit who bears witness with your spirit that this is finished ground.

And the other one has never once paid you. Not a wage, not an hour, not a night's sleep. The written word says the one who loves silver is never satisfied with silver, and the Spirit is entirely able to make a woman feel the truth of that without one thing being taken off her.