Maybe it comes from my heritage. I did, after all, have a grandfather who believed in planning so much that he not only plotted the garden to the square inch every year, he also made a diagram of where to hang the Christmas decorations. In the bathroom. My mother dusted and vacuumed on Mondays and cleaned bathrooms on Tuesdays and did laundry on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I haven’t lived with my mother for going on 26 years, well more than half my life, but I still know the housework schedule because it was immutable. I can’t claim to have any kind of a housework schedule at all, except that the living room needs to be vacuumed nearly every day (We have a mostly white dog and dark carpeting. Yes, poor planning.). Wherever it comes from, I know this about myself: When I make a plan, I like to stick to it. If I say I am going to do something, even if only to myself, I do everything I can to follow through, even when it’s hard, even when maybe I should pay attention to the circumstances around me and think better of it. Note to self: Thunderstorms do not make for a great beach day. Mostly, I like this aspect of my personality. If I’ve decided what to do, I get on with doing it instead of rethinking endlessly, always searching for a better plan and ending up getting nothing done. For someone who occasionally writes completed tasks on my to-do list for the simple pleasure of crossing them off, getting nothing done is not really a viable option. But I have kids, and sometimes, no matter what I planned, it’s just not going to work. This week, when we planned for Tony and Teresa and I to drive Frank to camp in Michigan and make a day of it, Teresa woke up with a 102-degree fever and a cough. A day that included several hours in the car was not going to work. Instead, Tony and his sister took Frank to camp and I stayed home with Teresa, getting nothing done because all she wanted to do was curl up next to me on the couch, alternately sleeping and watching “Curious George” on Netflix. Either way, for her to be comfortable, I had to be there. It’s not always being sick. Sometimes, it’s teenagers who made their own plans, and suddenly need a ride to a friend’s house or a ride home. Or a preschooler who has just had enough and making her do one more round of errands is asking for a tantrum. Or a school project that goes spectacularly wrong at the last minute and needs to be redone. My husband is much better at adjusting on the fly than I am. Sometimes his tendency to see plans more as guidelines than as roadmaps drives me crazy, but when the roadmap we’ve laid out suddenly doesn’t work, he’s good at figuring out another way to go. Jesus told his disciples to hit the road with no more than the clothes on their backs, and pointed to how the Father provides for the birds of the field. I don’t take that as a directive saying that all planning is bad, but maybe it’s a reminder that things don’t always have to go the way I think.