Fate and the Best Laid Plans

Sometimes the best laid plans do, as they say, go awry.  Today I planned to attend the Art for Heaven's Sake Festival in Redlands.  I have done so every year for the past several years.  It is something I look forward to.  I usually attend church at the Redlands United Church of Christ on whose ground the festival takes place.  It is a mid-sized fair with probably a hundred more or less artists exhibiting all types of art.  It is a show I really enjoy.

But not this year.  This year I had a bad attack of vertigo and wound up spending the day in and out of bed.  Not the day I planned.  Which makes me wonder if maybe it is instances like this that make it difficult for me to make actual plans.  It always seems that something goes awry.  I hate to think I am a "portender" of doom, but it does seem that my best laid plans seldom go according to, uh, plan.

Okay, call it fate.  It was my fate to miss the show and church and spend the day reeling from an undeserved hangover.  Who knows?  Fate knows!  Fate steps in and takes control.  Man merely acts it out and suffers the fate set forth for him.  Say what?  Fate controls what happens?  Why make plans then?  Huh?  Fate laughs at man's plans.  Say what?

Okay, this is very existential know.  Do we have any say in what happens to us?  Do we dare make plans?  Are we indeed "tempting fate?"  And why would fate be tempted....especially if fate already knows what it intends to set upon us?

So there you have it.  Fate is in the driver's seat.  Is this the way God wants it?  I am rather confused.  Make plans yet fate has other ideas?  This is a concept I have a hard time wrapping my mind around.  Yet, it seems, like the mystery of all that is holy, like the face and nature of God, I can accept it, and I know I need to continue to make plans.  Yes, I might get sick.  Yes, I could get hit by a bus on my way to the art fair.  That may be my fate.  But God knows, I must fly in its face and live my life, God willing, and sometimes fulfill my plan....and always know that sometimes, God has a better one.