What is your plan? How are you going to survive? I would ask while serving soup to the poor, or washing dishes at every Catholic Worker house, I visited across the country a few years ago. Many of the workers, paid nothing, living in community, busy everyday from a schedule of service, would run out of money, and I would ask again—what is your plan? Most of them would answer me the exact same way. . . . Pray. Pray?!?
I want long plans, charts, and security that I would have the enough to feed the families every week that call us for help, much less enough to pay rent. So as we are struggle to continue to feed our families, do our work of social justice, and we are not taking in enough to survive for long— and there are now 3 full time volunteers and a house full of people, and dozens of families that are concerned for our continued existence, and asking for a plan. I remember this advice— pray.
The Christmas story is one of human plans going wrong. Joseph plan is derailed as he marries this woman that is now pregnant; Herod plan to destroy the prophetic liberator of the poor is foiled. Plan to get a hotel room is not working.
A new plan is born, and the Jesus plan is a plan that we our constantly not in control of. Constantly when all seems lost, when all the plans of life seem to fail, when Joseph and Marry are cast out into a manger, when our families we serve are left without jobs, injured, and in shacks and trailers—we pray and sometimes god’s plan comes into view with gifts and grace. So it is now that I pray that we can be the grace in their lives. I pray we can be the part of God’s plan for them. You can be their food, their support, you can be their hope. You can be part of this plan. I pray that you are.