The Five-Year Plan on the Whiteboard

The whiteboard has been on that wall for four years and it is the first thing anybody sees coming into the apartment. There are arrows on it. There is a column for each year and a line across the middle and a small drawing of a house at the far right that started as a joke and has been re-drawn twice.

It has been redone maybe eleven times, and every version has had the same shape: a run of hard years, then an arrow, then the part where everything gets better. She has never said that out loud in those words. She would say it was a plan, and it was a good plan, and she is not stupid and neither is anybody who has ever drawn one.

The thing that happened in October was not dramatic. One item on the board, the one everything else was arranged around, became impossible. Not delayed. Impossible, for reasons that had nothing to do with her and could not have been foreseen by anybody. And she sat on the floor in front of that board for a long time, and what she felt was not disappointment. It was something much stranger and much more frightening, and she has not had a word for it until this week.

The word is vertigo. Because when the item went, the whole board went with it, and when the board went she found out what it had been doing, which was not planning. It had been holding her up. Everything she did between six in the morning and eleven at night made sense because of an arrow drawn in a marker pen, and without the arrow the days had nothing underneath them at all.

Anybody who has watched a plan collapse and felt the floor go with it knows this, and it is not a character flaw and I am not going to treat it as one. I have no word about the item on the board. What I want to talk about is the ground.

Somebody else did the laying

I want to put a line down and pay attention to who is doing the verbs, because almost the entire comfort of this verse is in its grammar.

Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.Isaiah 28:16

I lay. Not you lay. The subject of the sentence is God, and what He is described as doing is the one thing nobody in this story has been able to do, which is put down something that holds. It is already laid. It was laid before the whiteboard went up and it was laid before she was born.

And look at the adjective in the middle: a tried stone. Tested. Not theoretically load bearing. Proven under weight, before it was ever offered to anybody, which is the exact opposite of a plan, because a plan by definition has never been tested at the point where you are standing on it.

You are standing on a stone that was tried before you arrived, and the testing was not yours to do. That is not a soft thing I am saying about a hard October. It is what is written in Isaiah 28, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and puts it under somebody sitting on a floor. The board is marker on a wall. The stone is not.

Now the last clause, which is the strangest and the kindest: he that believeth shall not make haste. Some translations have it as shall not be put to shame, and both are in the Hebrew somewhere. Not make haste. Meaning: a person standing on that stone does not have to scramble. Does not have to rebuild the board tonight. Does not have to have a new arrow by Monday.

You have permission not to hurry, and it comes from the verse itself rather than from anybody being nice to you. Isaiah 28:16 is where that stands, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ancient promise slow a person's breathing down on a Saturday morning.

Nobody is in trouble for the whiteboard

Now let me say the thing this category exists to say, and say it early and plainly, because everything else depends on it being believed.

She is not being told off. There is no lesson here about idolatry of plans and I am not going to construct one. Making a plan is what a responsible adult does with an uncertain future, and drawing arrows on a board is not a sin, and the fact that the board turned out to be structural is not evidence of a spiritual defect. It is evidence that she needed ground and the board was the only ground on offer.

That distinction matters enormously. The article's job here is to put something better underneath her, not to prosecute her for what she was standing on. God does not knock a house down to teach somebody a lesson about foundations. He lays a stone.

For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.1 Corinthians 3:11

Paul says it as a plain fact about construction. There is one, it is already down, and no one is being asked to produce a replacement.

You were never asked to lay a foundation, and the one that is down was laid by Somebody else entirely. 1 Corinthians 3:11 is where that is written, and it is the Spirit who moves that from a page into a body that has been holding a whole life up with a marker pen.

You are held right now, in the exact hour where the plan is gone and nothing has replaced it. It is written that the stone is a sure foundation and the one who believes need not hurry, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true in the gap between one plan and the next.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the truth about the mornings. Being on the tried stone has never been a reason to sit alone with something that needs a real person in the room.