A Prayer for When Nothing Goes According to Plan

That's what my son, Sebastian, cried out in anguish recently.

He was sitting on the couch, having just woken up, trying to put his belt on. Like many things in this world that resist us, despite our best efforts, it refused to wind through the loop holes. Poor guy, he was woefully tired and grumpy and *so* not ready to start the day.

I'm in the kitchen getting school lunches ready, putting on the tea kettle, pouring bowls of cereal, when I hear him. I drop what I'm doing and run into the living, fearing the worst. What father's heart doesn't break when he hears his son erupt with such a cry of dereliction?

I kneel down to ask him what happened and he points to his twisted, incorrigible belt. I wrap my arms around him and tell him that I love him and that I'm sorry his stupid belt wasn't cooperating.

All of us have days like this. We have days that don't behave, days that go sideways, days that refuse to cooperate. We have days that turn into "Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Days." 

Or as my sweet son might put it, we have days where it feels like THE WHOLE EARTH IS AGAINST US.

I've tried to capture the feeling of such days in two prayers that show up in my book with Phaedra via IVP, Prayers for the Pilgrimage: A Book of Collects For All of Life. In fact, I've felt these feelings so frequently that I wrote two prayers with almost identical titles: "For When Nothing Goes According to Plan" and "For When Things Don't Go According to Plan." One comes under my Prayers for Work, while the other falls under my Prayers for Mundane Life.

We're two weeks away from the official release of our book but life keeps happening and things keep not going according to plan. If that's you, I hope that these prayers give voice to your heart's anguish and help you to feel that you're not completely alone.

At the very least, you can know that Sebastian knows how you feel. He really does.