When God Changes the Plan
Does your family live and die by a schedule or is constant, spontaneous change of direction the norm in your household? Both approaches to life offer advantages and disadvantages and reflect our own personalities as parents.
And depending on the personality of our kids, they may feel frustrated and insecure by even slight changes in the expected routine—or bored nearly to death by a rigid commitment not to violate the communicated schedule.
Whatever we personally feel more comfortable with, part of maturing as a Christian involves growing in our ability to trust God when He steps in and changes our plans. We hope to equip our kids with the tools to begin to do so, as well.
We’re pulling our talking points this week from Mark 6:30-44. Jesus and the disciples had a very reasonable plan to go off by themselves and get some rest. Instead, they ended up in another marathon ministry session that led to a food crisis and what felt like unreasonable expectations from Jesus to fix it.
You know the story of the feeding of the 5,000. We hope a few of these questions will help you to talk with your kids about that story—and how to expect God to always give us the resources we need to do what He asks even when it is unexpected.
Talking Points
- Which do you feel most comfortable with—having a set schedule where you know what to expect or being spontaneous and changing plans as you go along? Why do you prefer one or the other?
- How do you think our family tends to operate—mostly according to plan or mostly changing the plan as we go along? Do you like the way we tend to operate or does it sometimes frustrate you?
- Do you think one approach is necessarily better than the other or is it mostly about personality and what each of us prefers?
- Sometimes we have plans to do things—good things—and then they get changed by circumstances beyond our control. How frustrating is that for you? Can you think of a time recently when that happened?
- Do you ever wonder if God is involved in changing those plans for us? Can you think of reasons He would step in and redirect us from what we set out to do?
- Mark 6 tells a story about Jesus and the disciples when they had a plan to go off to a quiet place by themselves and get some rest. Instead, the crowds of people found them and Jesus decided to change the plan and keep teaching. How would you have felt about this, do you think, if you were one of the tired disciples?
- Can you think of times when we changed our plans as a family to help someone in need? How did you feel about that at the time?
- The spontaneous change of plans created a problem. People were hungry and there wasn’t much food nearby. Can you think of a time when an unexpected change of plan caused a problem for our family that needed fixing?
- How do we usually think about those kinds of problems—as a hassle or as an opportunity to see how God will help us fix it?
- The disciples came up with a good plan to fix the problem: Send the people away to go get themselves some food. Instead, Jesus asked the disciples to feed the people with almost no food. Does that command sound unreasonable to you?
- It would have been understandable for the disciples to have a bad attitude about Jesus asking them to do an impossible thing—especially at the end of day when all of their plans had been changed. Do you think that would have made it okay to have a bad attitude about it?
- What would the disciples have missed out on if they had refused to participate because of their disappointment, tiredness, and sense of unfair treatment? [Parent: Emphasize that the disciples would have missed out on seeing God do something truly miraculous right in front of their eyes.]
- God is always working, even in our ordinary everyday lives. Will we miss noticing what He’s up to if we can’t “handle” an unexpected change of plans and the new problems it might create?
- What can we do as a family to avoid getting negative and to help each other look for what God is up to when our plans get changed?
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