Planning Adequately For The New Year

THE NEED FOR PERSONAL PLANNING

If you forget all that happened in the past, if becomes a challenge planning properly for the future. The future does not always depend on the past but it must learn from it. The future is bright when you have enough energy to face what is ahead of you. Moving into the unknown has been faced with anxiety and concern due to the uncertainty that surrounds it. Taking time to plan carefully removes some of the fog that encircles what is coming.

Each year is an opportunity to BECOME BETTER and PERFORM BETTER. The difference is PERSONAL PLANNING. Planning ahead of starting a new year can lead to a more fulfilled life, better performance, and higher levels of productivity. When you do not plan, you will find yourself thinking more than necessary. Your mind will overwork as you will be trying to remember everything because nothing is written down. But you will feel more organized and at rest when things are well written down, not matter how unrefined it may seem. Every area of our lives require careful planning.

God is a master planner. The entire plan of salvation was a long term plan that He carefully executed over several years and fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ and His ultimate death on the cross. The deliverance of the children of Israel was a great plan that was carefully executed. The precision of the exodus and the detailed plans that characterised the night of their departure from Egypt are simply admirable. You read how He revealed the plan for preparing for a long season of drought to Joseph and how Joseph carried it out with precision and great leadership. Plans are brilliant and planning is a noble activity. Each individual life must be carefully planned. Families need a plan and institutions plan on a continual basis. Leaders have a duty to plan with their team to come out with collective decisions.

Many churches leave planning to the last minute. You will find pastors asking their congregants and worshippers to come up with how they want the coming year to be for them on 31st December night. At that time, it is very late, if not too late. Doing annual budgets are very useful for every church. But that should not be the only planning that is carried out. The budget is to be based on the plan as it constitutes the costs of the different components of the plan that has been put together. We need not reduce planning to simply having a budget as a church. And families need to plan together for the coming year, and do so weeks before the end of the year.

Let us focus on personal level planning. To do that effectively, you look back, look forward and do the details.

LOOK BACK

Human beings are very forgetful. At the same time, we vividly remember the negative things that have happened to us. When we take time to reflect on the good things that have taken place in our lives over a period of time, you will find how many things there are to thank God for. We also need to remember the things that did not go well and allow our hearts to be healed. A covered wound does not heal very well. Psalm 103:1-2 says “Bless the LORD, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name! Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits”.

The Israelites often forgot the goodness of God and His acts of deliverance. Psalm 106:13 says “They soon forgot His works; they did not wait for His counsel”. I kept asking myself, ‘how do you forget that you walked through the Red Sea on dry ground, or that you are manna, food that came from heaven on a daily basis. If it were not for the power and presence of God, they would all have perished of hunger and thirst in the wilderness. Instead of asking Moses nicely, they were complaining. And we also complain a lot these days, forgetting what the Lord has done for us.

We look back, not to stay in the past, but so we can learn from it; so we can forgive those who have hurt us; so we can let go what was painful. Remember things that did not go so well and those that are painful and hand them over to the Lord. Do not hold on to it. When you are free of them, your hands are also free to receive blessings from the Lord.

LOOK FORWARD

We remember so we can forget. If you do not call it to mind, it can go and hide in the subconscious and be affecting your life and conduct. Remembering helps us to face it deal with it.