Like you, we have plans for the fall of 2020. This year will should might mark a major transition in our home; with the oldest of our children all pursuing their adult lives beyond our homeschool, we’ll be focusing on the youngest five on a day to day basis. Christopher has his usual international travel schedule already in motion, and will continue to have stateside responsibilities in planning, coordinating, and more. But he has resigned his online teaching position effective the end of this semester, and will instead focus his efforts in that area on the middle schoolers in our local CC community, taking up the mantle of Challenge A Director. Jude will be an official kindergartener (what?!?) and will join us as an Abecedarian, a role which he is already anticipating. And, for the first time, Phineas will be a full participant in our weekly community days. I’ll be moving from tutoring the oldest ages back down to the middle so that I can guide him in a developmentally-appropriate navigation of the day’s tasks.
We’ve planned for a lot of change. But we have no idea if it’s going to happen, or what it will look like if it does. The once solid plans we all had in place for fall of 2020 are suddenly a whole lot fuzzier than any of us hoped.
I hear that uncertainty building into frustration for many right now. And while we’re all along on the “what’s next?” train, I recognize that the weight of that burden has differing consequences for everyone. For us, the question of whether or not our community has the classroom space to honor restrictions on suggested social distancing space doesn’t impact our livelihood, just our comfort. For other friends, there’s the very real concern of whether public schools will be back in session, providing them childcare and the chance to return to a full-time job. For my college kids, it’s grappling with the reality that their college experience may not look the same going forward. For so many others, it’s wondering if their business will fail, or if they will be laid off due to financial shortfalls.
The one thing that seems to be sure is that right now, nothing is sure.
We’ve already experienced a total disruption of our norm. And even when lockdown restrictions are lifted, the ball that started rolling when all of this crashed onto the scene will continue knocking down the plans and assumptions we had built up at least through the end of the year. Germany has cancelled Oktoberfest, for goodness sake. Even if there’s no second wave… even if we mimic Sweden’s completely voluntary approach to social distancing measures from this moment forward… the conversation has shifted on a global level, and we will feel it, right down to the individual level.
What I’m telling my children— heck, what I’m telling myself— is this: patience. Our plans have been disrupted. Our plans will continue to be disrupted. All of this is Biblical, after all.
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.”
Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”
— James 4: 13-15
We can’t know where we’re headed. We didn’t know where we were headed when we made the plans we’re fretting over now— if we had, we wouldn’t have made the plans, right?
So what do we do? We explore options. We knock on doors of opportunity we didn’t realize we needed to visit. We think out of the box. We realign our expectations with our reality.
And we wait.
We wait with anticipation, praying that those good things we had lined up for our futures come to pass. We wait with expectation, knowing that an answer will make itself known in due time. And we wait with hope, trusting that God has another chapter in our story, one perhaps that we didn’t see coming, but that was needful for our sanctification and the glory of His Name.
Many are the plans in the mind of a man,
but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.
—Proverbs 19:21