Hello, Bridge Town Church. I'm John Mark Comer here with the Bridge Town Daily for Wednesday, March 18th.

It has been a crazy week. I imagine that for a number of you, all sorts of plans have been disrupted.

Everything from a trip or travel or work or your children are home from school or just the mundane of day to day.

I'm an obsessive-compulsive planner, and so I feel all of the anxiety in my body this morning I was doing email.

And every time an email would come in that had anything to do with schedule or a meeting two weeks out or a month out, I would just start to chuckle

because there's literally no way to plan right now. It's day to day, even more, it's hour to hour.

And just keep thinking about a line from James Letter, chapter 4, verse 13 to 17. Let me read it over you. He writes this.

Now listen, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money,

why you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

Instead, you ought to say, if it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.

As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil. If anyone then knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it, it is sin for them.

This is a little bit of a stark warning from James, not against planning per se, but against the arrogance and assumption that is behind so much of our planning.

He writes that we are still to plan for travel and life and business, go to this city, do this thing, such and such, just with the always caveat, if it is the Lord's will.

If you grew up in the church, you are used to hearing people say, God willing, you don't hear that on the street of the city.

The reality is, our arrogance and assumption behind so much of our planning is rooted in a false sense of control.

I recently read that the average westerner has 15% of the control over their life they think they do.

Q, all of the stats on anxiety long before the pandemic.

But the pandemic is an invitation to face reality in general, and in particular the reality that we are not in control, or at least not nearly as in control of our life or even of our own health and body as we think.

The western world with all of its science and technology and an app to order food off of your phone, all of which is great, but the danger is it can't help but lures us into a false sense of security and pride.

This is why, for example, planning for the future, many of us don't realize this, but it's unique to western culture really just to the developed world.

If you spend any time in a developing world, in the global south or in parts of Africa or Asia, one of the first things you notice is that's very hard for an outsider, for a westerner or a tourist or a visitor from the developed world, is just how little planning there is, day to day, and how hard it is to figure out what the plan is, what's going to happen.

And it's not because people lack some kind of job training from Stephen Covey or whatever, it's because people are aware of reality, they realize just how unpredictable and out of our control, and at times dangerous life is.

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