Plans Change

Plans Change

“I never read fiction,” my friend declared. “I only read stories that are true.” The literary gauntlet was thrown down—and a challenge accepted. We agreed to swap books. He offered historical nonfiction in exchange for a novel of my choosing. I accepted his worn copy of Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage and handed him Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying.

The leap of faith was mostly his. I’m almost certain Gaines’s novel was the first my friend had ever determined to tackle start to finish. But the pleasure, I fear, was mostly mine. A Lesson Before Dying is fiction that reads like fact and rings utterly true—even though its characters are born of imagination. Endurance is fact so unimaginable that it reads like fiction.

Sir Ernest Shackleton attempted, in 1914, to cross Antarctica. He’d wanted to be the first man to reach the South Pole, but two others beat him there. So he found a new dream, but he failed at that, too. Sort of. He never completed his intended 1,500-mile trek. But he kept twenty-seven men alive for two years after disaster struck, and ultimately brought them to safety. Plans change.

Shackleton began his voyage at age forty, setting sail from England. After five months at sea, his great ship became wedged in ice. Only a day’s sail from their destination, he and his men were stranded for eleven months waiting for the ice to free them. It didn’t. Instead, it crushed his ship until it gave way with a giant groan into a heap of wood and steel and wire. Plans change. Shackleton and his men were at the mercy of the wind and the water, and they knew it. Their captain never began the journey he intended—but he finished one he never might have started had the choice been left to him.

I’m not where I thought I might be today. Maybe you’re not either. But God is writing a story with your life and with mine—one grounded in reality, yet as unpredictable and luminous as fiction. I am learning to let his hand have free reign with the manuscript, because thankfully, plans do change.

Jesus said to his disciples, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me.”

Matthew 16:24