The end of James 4 says this:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.
Have you ever considered what it would be like to be an ant? A pretty short life span, mostly have no direction other than what you immediately see and smell... not appetizing. But the other hand, have you ever seen an aluminum casting of an ant hill? No? Check this out. It's amazing.
By no means am I saying that God looks at us like we look at ants. We are his supreme image bearers that he has paid a high price to redeem and we have been made children and heirs. On the other hand, our lives are a vapor that is here and then is gone. Our plans are not unlike the ant's: we must live based off information in front of our faces because we cannot see the big picture.
In case it is unclear, we are not God. God is God. He is the one that knows what has been and what will be. He is the one that has authority over time and death and everything else. Frankly, to live as if we have even the slightest bit of control is suicidal lunacy.
Yesterday, I stood chest-deep in the ocean. There is no firm footing on the ocean floor; if a few waves had converged, I might have been carried out too far to swim in. Helpless, but in utter bliss. To be transparent, I am unsure about camp. I am unsure about grad school. My heart is fickle, but somehow has the loudest voice in my head. Who knows what is real or what will be? I feel personally the least in control of my life that I ever have, but I have also never known freedom so well.
True freedom means knowing not that you can do whatever you want, but instead that He that can do whatever He wants wants you. Our God desires for us to know Him. He wants us to follow Him and to give us guidance about how to live these brief lives. He is the only stability, the only one that knows what is to come, and the only one that will be able to give us what we desire. Our lives, at best a breeze in a windstorm, change. Our God does not.
