Jesus Doesn’t Have a Plan for Your Life: A Series

Welcome to the wrap-up post of my 3 part-video series about Jesus and his alleged plan for your life.

I’ve been doing some thinking on this subject for some time, perhaps the last 12 years. There are a lot of oddly-contradictory messages when it comes to the topic of calling, vocation, our personal desires, our personal skills, God’s foreknowledge, and God’s love. The most destructive I’ve seen is, “Jesus has a plan for your life. You will be fully fulfilled if your pray and pay attention.” This, in the minds of so many that hear it, is immediately translated into “the amount of dissatisfaction you have with your life is directly proportional with your distance from God’s plan for you.” To combat this message, I made this video.

I knew I needed some background wisdom for the series. The second video focuses a little bit on how Christians used to think about (or not think about) these things. I added some Biblical wisdom just for kicks.

After tearing things down, it was time to build a few things back up. If Jesus doesn’t have a plan for us, how is it that He loves us? How does His message intersect with my life? How are all of these ideas any better than the ideas we rejected in the first place. It was time to answer these questions.

Thanks for following me on this short, yet important journey. I did not start thinking it was going to be three separate videos. But, like I said, I had been thinking about these things for over 10 years and it was time to say what I had learned. This isn’t even near everything I think and know on the topic. When I chat with my Catholic friends, often the conversation turns to one of the ideas in these videos. If you want to know how Catholics can bring their faith into their lives, you need to give them the tools to allow the two to intersect, not just crosses on chains to wear around their necks.