Life doesn’t give us control over everything. And wisdom isn’t about finding the perfect decision.

Wisdom is about trusting God enough to take the next faithful step. God isn’t asking you to make perfect decisions. He’s inviting you into a trusting relationship.

God is a Redeemer. He redeems things, even your life. You can survive imperfect decisions. You can learn. You can grow. You can change direction. You can make Plan B. Or Plan M.

And really, what is wrong with Plan B?

What if you’re one decision away from learning, rather than one decision away from disaster?

That changes everything.

Besides, how do you know what Plan A is? Is this really what God wants? You go with Plan A, believing it is what God wants for you. Then Plan A fails. What if Plan B turns out to be exactly what God wanted? Maybe you end up on Plan M. Is this what God always wanted as Plan A, even if it wasn’t a direct route?

We spend so much energy worrying about whether we have made the right decision that we forget the character of God we are trusting.

The Christian life is a wide path. It is not a narrow tightrope. Psalm 18:36 says, “You have made a wide path for my feet to keep them from slipping.”

Who made the path? God did. Who made the path wide? God did. Perhaps God made it wide because God wants us to participate in our lives. God gives us room to make decisions, learn from them, and keep moving with him.

Is there a Plan A? Maybe God has 50,000 plans for us, and any one of them would be okay. Could it be that every decision we make, big or small, has a pathway toward the life God wants for us? Not every choice is equally wise, and some choices have painful consequences. But even when we get it wrong, God can redeem what comes next.

Someone in my church shared this while we were talking about this idea: God’s pathway for him surely wasn’t to become a Christian at age 35. But it is the pathway that is working out well.

Isn’t that how it often goes? We look back at the wide and forgiving road of our lives and see things we never would have chosen, decisions we wish we could redo (oh, the regrets), and twists we never expected. Yet here we are, still being formed, still learning, still discovering what it means to trust God—with good fruit in abundance.

One of my sons is about to exit prison after 28 years. That is not the best plan for anyone’s life, certainly not God’s plan for his life. There is no way Plan A was prison for him. Yet those 28 years have been fruitful and purposeful. So will be what happens next for him.

Those 28 years don’t become good because he spent them in prison. The losses are real. The consequences are real. But even there, God has not stopped working, redeeming, and growing him. I can’t wait for the next plan to start for his life! We are well-prepared for freedom with everything he has learned, lived, and will have more freedom to be God’s plan.

Then there is the biblical story of Jonah. God gave Jonah a plan and Jonah chose to run in the opposite direction. As if Jonah could outrun God and ruin his plans! Isn’t it funny that Jonah thinks running away is somehow going to thwart what God wants to do?

God is not fragile. (My son knows this personally.)

Jonah’s story is full of Plan B: running to Tarshish, being swallowed by a great fish, and eventually preaching in Nineveh. Jonah wanted nothing to do with God’s plan, but God made a way for the people of Nineveh to hear his message from Jonah. Jonah’s detour didn’t stop God from doing what God wanted to do. God is not fragile.

Even as Jonah is pouting, he is declaring the character of God: “So he complained to the Lord about it: ‘Didn’t I say before I left home that you would do this, Lord? That is why I ran away to Tarshish! I knew that you are a merciful and compassionate God, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. You are eager to turn back from destroying people.’” Jonah 4:2.

Jonah ran even though he knew God’s character. He ran because he didn’t want what God wanted. And God still pursued his purposes. Plan A happened, Plan B became a great story.

God’s mercy isn’t an endorsement of Jonah’s disobedience. But Jonah’s disobedience wasn’t more powerful than God’s mercy, either.

How wide has your path been for God to do what he wants with your life? How many unexpected turns have brought you to a place you couldn’t have imagined when you started?

Then what is wrong with Plan B?

The sum total of your life is Plan A through M. For some of you, it may be Plan ZZ.

You are not going to get every decision right. None of us do. You will make decisions with incomplete information. You will learn things you couldn’t have known beforehand. You will change your mind. You will need to apologize, make amends, and start again. You will have to forgive yourself for those regrets.

That is part of being human. It is also part of learning to trust God. God who is not fragile and redeems everything.

You don’t have to turn every decision into a test of whether you have heard God perfectly. You don’t have to live as if one wrong turn will put you permanently outside the reach of God’s goodness.

Make the wisest decision you can with what you know. Take the next faithful step. And trust the Redeemer with what happens next.

What is wrong with Plan B?

Maybe nothing that God cannot work with.