You know that old saying, “Hope for the best, but plan for the worst?” Maybe it should be changed to “Hope for the best and plan for it, too.”
That probably sounds like an unrealistic dreamland to a lot of people, but consider it for just a minute. What if, instead of focusing all our time on what if everything goes wrong, we began to visualize how great it would be if it all goes right ?
Now I am not talking about “blue-skying” everything or living in a “Peter Pan Utopia,” there is plenty of that out there. The self-help gurus line their pockets selling that from their books and seminars on the keys to developing a “positive attitude.”
The Psalmist, King David, who had his share of ups and downs, seemed to have the most realistic and solid perspective on a good attitude “surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.” He understood that there was divine plan unfolding in his life. It has always been a mystery of how even bad things can turn out for our good.
I always think of Phil Collins when it comes to turning a bad situation to something good. It was the breakdown of his first marriage in 1980, which provided the theme for his first major solo hit, In The Air Tonight, and many others like it. Listening to his side of the story, he was broken and the victim of a bad divorce, but it did set the atmosphere for some great music. (I have no doubt about his brokenness at the time, but I know his wife Andrea sees it a little differently. Let’s face it being on the road and away from home for long stretches of time takes its toll on any marriage).
Ok more to the point, If we’re going to live a little dangerously, maybe we need to stop wasting our time planning for every worst case scenario. In almost any risk you take, the likelihood of actually winding up in the worst case scenario is incredibly low. Spending all of your time and energy preparing for it is not only wasted, but it stops you from even trying.
The plans we make and expectations we set tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies. If you spend all your time figuring out how to avoid life’s pitfalls, that’s probably what you’ll end up spending most of your time doing — avoiding pitfalls. We completely hamstring any possibility of truly succeeding by spending all your time figuring out how “not to fail.”
As the song says, “When all the parts of the puzzle start to look like they fit”, there are plenty of good day too: