A new day. A new year. New beginnings. It’s a time for resolutions and goals, for re-assessing the current and making plans for the future. Whether it’s January 1st, our birthday, a new job, or some other new beginning, we tend to see them as a chance to start afresh.

I’ve never been much of a planner, not in the strictest sense. I like to dream and consider the future, but I tend to forget — or flat-out ignore — the specifics it takes to get there. At least until the moment for change is upon me. Then I’m so super-focused on those details that I can miss the bigger picture and completely freak myself out.

Yet I can come off as rather perfectionistic about details, which may cause some to think I’m a big planner. I think that perfectionism is because I’m already at the freak-out stage and trying to micro-manage every single detail.

This year I want to learn how to focus my desires and mold them into plans, even if those plans are just outlines and loose sketches. The last few years have taught me the value of focusing on the specifics because I’ve seen how my career, my dreams, my recovery, even my walk with God stall out for lack of a plan. What good is it to know where you want to go, if you don’t know how you’re going to get there?

In the past I figured I would work that out as I went along, not realizing how lost I could get on the way. I’m grateful that I never went so far out into the weeds that I lost the path altogether. I think I owe that more to God’s hand on my life than I do my own sense of direction.

This is what the Lord says: “You will be in Babylon for seventy years. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again. For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.  — Jeremiah 29: 10 – 11 (New Living Translation)

That God has plans for me still amazes me. That I am considered by the Almighty God is crazy in itself, but that He created a unique part for me to play in His plans for this world can just blow my mind at times. So if God has a plan, why do I need one? Shouldn’t I just wait for Him to guide me where He wants me to go?

I wrestle with these questions from time to time, and the only conclusion I can draw — more from my own experience and life than anything else — is that it’s not an either/or scenario. It’s a both/and one. It is that God has plans for me and He wants me to actively participate in the planning process. It is that God wants to guide me where He wants me to go and he wants me to create a course of action to follow — in pencil so it’s fluid, changeable.

There was no real, lasting recovery from alcoholism until Bill W. and Dr. Bob began to chart a course together that would later become known as the 12 Steps. While the steps stand alone as significant, these foundations are principles that can be found throughout Scripture. God guided, man set down a course of action.

Also, Paul sought God’s guidance as he spread the Good News of Jesus throughout Greece, Cyprus and Rome. Yet he still made plans to go to those places most pressing on his heart. Sometimes he was so set in his plans that God had to send him dreams to turn him another direction.

Yes, God has plans for me. And He is more than willing and eager to share them with me. And He also wants me to participate in this adventure by charting a course in the direction of the dreams and visions He placed in me.

How about you? Are you creating a course of action (or two) to reach the shores of a dream or vision God has given you? What are those dreams and action plans?