James 4:13-15 (13)Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— (14)yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. (15)Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”(ESV)
There are moments when life crosses a threshold before we even have words for what changed.
Sometimes it’s the moment a person is saved. Sometimes it’s the moment a final decision is made. Sometimes it’s the moment after hearing that someone close has died. Nothing may look different yet, but everything is different. What was is now gone. What comes next is unknown.
We experience these moments more often than we admit.
The problem is that we aren’t very good at living with the unknown. So we make plans. That isn’t wrong. Planning is wise. But somewhere along the way, our plans can stop being tools and start becoming foundations. We begin to lean on them as if they are guaranteed. We build our identity around what we believe will happen next.
Then the foundation cracks.
The job changes. The relationship shifts. The diagnosis comes. The door closes. The person dies. The plan falls apart.
And for a moment, we don’t just lose the plan. We lose our sense of self.
The warning isn’t that we should never plan. The warning is that tomorrow doesn’t belong to us.
We aren’t promised the next year. We aren’t promised the next season. We aren’t even promised the next breath. Every plan we make sits beneath the words, “If the Lord wills.”
That shouldn’t make us passive.
It should make us honest.
The future isn’t the foundation. The plan isn’t the foundation. The version of life we imagined isn’t the foundation.
Christ is.
And when the threshold comes, when the old thing is gone and the new thing hasn’t yet taken shape, we aren’t as lost as we feel. We may not know what comes next, but we can know who holds us there.
The unknown is frightening when our plans are our foundation.
But when Christ is the foundation, even the unknown becomes ground we can walk on.
Walking With Christ 
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