Yes! God Does Have a Plan for Regular Folks!

Yes! God Does Have a Plan for Regular Folks!

Finding God’s Plan for You

By Joel Mears

Copyright 2011 Joel Mears

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Unless otherwise indicated, Bible quotations are taken from New International Version of the Bible. Copyright © 1980 by Zondervan

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: An Introduction

Chapter 2: When God Doesn’t Seem To Have a Plan (A Study of God’s Plan for the Life of Ruth)

Chapter 3: When God Seems To Have a Plan, But We Can’t See It (A Study of God’s Plan for the Life of Daniel)

Chapter 4: When God’s Plan Just Doesn’t Seem to Come Together (A Study of God’s Plan for the Life of Joseph)

Chapter 5: When God’s Plan Comes at Too High a Cost (A Study of God’s Plan for the Life of Esther)

Chapter 6: When Everyone Else Keeps Messing Up God’s Plan (A Study of God’s Plan for the Life of Moses)

Chapter 7: When God’s Plan Seems To Fall Apart (A Study of God’s Plan for the Life of Elijah)

Chapter 8: When Someone Else Seems to Get God’s Plan for You (A Study of God’s Plan for the Life of Jonathon)

Chapter 9: When I Keep Messing Up God’s Plan (A Study of God’s Plan for the Life of Simon Peter)

Chapter 10: When God’s Plan Hurts (A Study of God’s Plan for the Life of Mary)

Chapter 11: God Has a Plan for You (A Study of God’s Plan for Your Life)

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Preface

I was born into a family full of intellectuals. My immediate family consisted of folks who all excelled academically and then pursued careers in fields where thinking folks worked. My father graduated from The University of South Carolina with a degree in English. He then continued his education at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary where he earned both a Masters degree and a Doctors degree. My older brother graduated from Furman University with an undergraduate degree in Church Music. He earned his Masters degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as well. My younger sister also graduated from Furman University earning an undergraduate degree in Spanish. She then received both a Masters degree and a PhD in Homiletics from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

As for me, I went to Clemson University, where I studied Engineering. After graduation I pursued my engineering career by working in maintenance departments in different mills and industrial plants, primarily along the coast of South Carolina. Somebody in the family had to get a regular job, and that was me. I was the regular guy in the family - the one who didn’t quite fit in during the conversations around the Thanksgiving table.

I’ve worked in just about every field in industry that you can imagine. During the early years of my life I worked on a farm cropping tobacco and milking cows. Later, I found that I could make more money working as a construction laborer, so I learned how to dig foundation footings and hang red iron. After I graduated from Clemson, I worked for eight months at Reliance Electric designing electric motors. Later, my wife Beth and I moved to Georgetown, SC, where I went to work for Georgetown Steel Corporation. I worked there for approximately nine years. During those nine years, my career path took me through almost every maintenance department within the mill, as well as several production departments. Upon leaving the steel industry, I worked for a couple of years as a stevedore, loading and unloading ships that came to the port in Georgetown. From there, I took a job with the largest papermaking company in the world, International Paper Company. I held various positions within the paper mill in both maintenance engineering and papermaking production. I spent most of my time in the basements of paper machines sorting out problems.

Now, what in the world has all of that got to do with this book? Well, during that seemingly disorganized journey, I spent a lot of time reading books that other people had written about success, dreams and finding God’s purpose. One day it occurred to me that most of those books had been written by intellectual people. People like my family (none of whom, by the way, had ever eaten a peanut butter sandwich in an electric shop, while simultaneously trying to learn something from a maintenance worker without letting everyone in the shop in on the secret that I had no clue as to how to fix whatever the day’s big challenge was). The books I had read were typically written for regular people like me, but they weren’t written by regular people. They weren’t written by people who were trying to balance regular people problems with regular people priorities on regular people pay. So it began to occur to me that maybe there was a need for regular folks to have some books written by a regular person - books that are written in the midst of life’s everyday battles while searching for God‘s will and His plan.

It was out of that thought that I began to ponder this book. I spent a couple of years of going back and reading the notes that I had scratched in the margins of my Bible, right there in a cubicle in a paper mill. These were notes that were written as I tried to decipher what in the world God was up to, and why I couldn’t seem to get a clear focus on where He had us heading. Finally, I felt led to write a book about God’s lessons for regular folks. So, welcome to my first book entitled, Yes! God Does Have a Plan for Regular Folks! Finding God’s Plan for You. I hope that you enjoy it, and I hope that in some way it will help as you continue to seek God’s plan for your life.

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Chapter 1

An Introduction

As I begin writing this book and putting words on paper, I am approaching my 47th birthday. The ideas that are coming together began over a year ago as I was looking back over my life and career and trying to make sense of my life’s journey. In thinking about all of the crazy, illogical twists and turns that have been a part of the path of my life, I wondered, God, how in the world could this be part of an organized plan? I looked back at the success of my career and tried to equate that to God’s plan for my life. In looking back at my career, I think of how I started in electric motor design. Next, I worked in the steel industry, first in maintenance and then in operations. Then I formed my own company with three other partners. I sold my share in the company and ventured into stevedoring. Almost immediately, I recognized what a mistake that career move was, and I went to work in the paper industry. Finally, I left the industrial arena to pursue my career in residential and commercial engineering. As I began to think about all of the changes that I had been through, none of it seemed to make any sense. It just hadn’t gone like I thought it would go. As a young man I had made such ambitious plans for my very bright future.

I assumed, as I was finishing school, that God had made me special, and that I was going to excel according to the world’s measure of success. I was going to get one job after another. Each job was going to progress in responsibility, power, prestige and profit. I guess that I just assumed that the end of this process would find me as a high end executive for a large manufacturing firm, making very important decisions that would benefit thousands of workers (regular folks), and make me a local hero. Guess what? That is not where I found myself.

A year ago, I started asking God, What gives? What is the deal? What are you up to? Where is the plan?

I didn’t find the answer right away. What I did find was the one constant that my Daddy always taught me: to get back to God’s word and find out what He has to say about all of my questions, and figure out what He has to say about my life and His plan for it. So that is what I did. I spent the better part of a year going back and studying some of the great heroes of the Bible. I looked at God’s plan for them and how it might have looked from their perspective as they were living it out. I have often looked at people in the Bible with my 20/20 vision because I could turn the page and already know the outcome. I looked at Joseph after he is thrown into the well, and thought, Hey that is no big deal. He is going to rule all of Egypt in just a couple of more chapters. But, Joseph didn’t know that while he was in the well.

So, I began to wonder, What were these people thinking? What were they experiencing? That is what led to this book, Yes! God Does Have a Plan for Regular Folks! Finding God’s Plan for You. Sometimes it is hard to remember that God has a plan for each one of us regular folk. We get so caught up in the routine of clocking in and counting units. The units might be measured in tons of production, hours on the clock, tests corrected, emergency calls responded to, visits made, items sold or whatever you count on a daily basis. However the routine is measured, it is like mental Novocain. After we count all of the units during our working hours, we’ve got all of that other stuff to do. We’ve got family taxi routes to run, errands to handle, meals to cook, housework, yard work, scouts, dance, church, and the list goes on. Without even engaging our brain, it is bed time! We haven’t even begun to find time for God or ourselves. The idea that He created us for a specific purpose, with a specific job to do that is part of His Master Plan, is as foreign to us as some exotic language.

But He did! He didn’t just make a plan to go along with us once we showed up here. He created us to fulfill His plan. There is a job that only we can do. Sure, if we refuse to do it, or if we just neglect to do it, God will find a way to accomplish it. God always finds a way to get it done. But, our part of God’s plan can only be perfectly performed when we perform it.

So, God has a plan for us regular folks. But how do we find it? How do we plug into it and fulfill it? Well, after spending the last year with these heroes in the Bible, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that I’m not sure. The good news is that I’m convinced that God is sure, and He has left us with some clues. The clues might be discovered by allowing the Holy Spirit to teach us about how God worked out His plan for some of our favorite Bible heroes. Some of them are regular folks, kind of like us. Most of them, however, are extraordinary heroes and leaders. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have been remembered in the Bible. In any case, there are some very real and relevant truths about finding God’s plan for just regular, everyday people hidden in the stories of their lives.

Now, let’s have some fun while we study about how God plans the paths of regular folks.

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Chapter 2

When God Doesn’t Seem To Have a Plan

(A Study of God’s Plan for the Life of Ruth)

The story of Ruth is a fascinating story. It begins by introducing us to a perfect little Jewish family, a regular family for their day I suppose. There is a father, mother and two sons, and they are living a regular folk life in the little village of Bethlehem. Their life is regular until a severe famine spreads across the land. The father, Elimelech, determines that the best way for his family to survive this famine is for him to move them to the country of Moab where there is still food to eat and a means to provide for the family. So Elimelech, his wife, Naomi, and their two sons, Mahlon and Kilion, all move to Moab. Soon after arriving in Moab, Elimelech dies leaving Naomi with just her two sons. The sons eventually marry Moabite women, one named Orpah (not Oprah) and the other named Ruth. After another ten years, Mahlon and Kilion also die leaving Naomi without her husband or her sons to care for herself or her two Moabite daughters-in-law. Now in their day and time, this was not a good thing. Let‘s just say that during this period in history, it was in a woman’s best interest to have a man around for security. So, Naomi did the same thing that a lot of us regular folk do when faced with a really big giant in our lives. She decided to run. Naomi encouraged both of her daughters-in-law to return to their mothers. She told them that she was returning back to her home, Bethlehem. Now, Naomi must have treated her daughters-in-law really well because they both began to cry and to tell her that they wanted to stay with her. But, at Naomi’s insistence, Orpah agreed to return to her family. Ruth, on the other hand, refused to do so. In fact, in her refusal we find one of the greatest passages in the Bible to demonstrate loyalty and commitment. In Ruth 1:16-18 we read:

But Ruth replied, Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.

So Ruth spoke it out there. She was determined that she would go with Naomi back to Bethlehem, or wherever Naomi went, and they would be together.

So the two women returned together to Bethlehem. Now notice one of the things that we learn here about God’s plan. We are talking about when God doesn’t seem to have a plan. Look at the timing of the return of Naomi and Ruth to Bethlehem at this very disillusioned time in their lives. In Ruth 1:22 we read: So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning. See, God’s plan was working in the background, but they didn’t realize it. They weren’t even looking for it. They arrived back in Bethlehem and the barley harvest was under way! Of course, they were starving and they had no way to get any food, so Ruth asked Naomi if she could go find a field somewhere where she could walk behind the harvesters and pick up the grain that they dropped (Ruth 2:2). This practice was called gleaning. Naomi granted Ruth permission and Ruth headed out to find a field where she could glean. Well, it just so happened, that she entered a field and where there was barley to be gleaned and Ruth gleaned all morning. She took a little break at midday, and then gleaned all afternoon. Sometime during the afternoon, Boaz, the landowner, showed up. Again, what a coincidence that she had chosen to glean in the field of Boaz!

Boaz inquired of his workers about the young lady gleaning so diligently in his field. They told him that she was Ruth, the Moabite daughter-in-law of Naomi. Boaz immediately took steps to insure that Ruth was well cared for and safe among his workers. When Ruth returned home at the end of the day, with leftover food and about half of a bushel of threshed barley, Naomi asked her where she spent the day working. Ruth told her everything about the day, including how this man named Boaz had taken such good care of her, to which Naomi exclaimed:

The Lord bless him! Naomi said to her daughter-in-law, The Lord has not stopped showing his kindness to the living and the dead. She added, That man is our close relative; he is one of our kinsman-redeemers. (Ruth 2:20)

A kinsman-redeemer was a man who was close kin to another man who had died and left a widow with no one to care for her. The kinsman-redeemer was then expected to purchase the dead man’s property and marry his widow in order to possibly produce a male heir to carry on the dead man’s name.

I think as regular folk, considering this story of Ruth, we need to stop for a minute and reflect on a few things. Did you notice that Ruth managed to pick up a total of half a bushel of barley on her first day? Also, at the end of that long day, she didn’t head for home and a hot shower. First, she stopped by the threshing floor and threshed it all. It is obvious to me that maybe Ruth hadn’t yet become able to focus on God’s great plan for her life. What she had done was work as hard as she