A Plan? Don’t I Wish
By Debra DuPree Williams @DDuPreeWilliams
Today my husband and I tackled a chore that we had completed a couple of days earlier. Yes, you read that correctly. We had finished this job earlier in the week. Yet, here we were redoing it. Why? You may ask. Well, we didn’t have a plan. Do you know the quote, “A goal without a plan is just a wish?” How I wish we had made a plan.
It’s amazing how one little four letter word can make such a huge difference. If we had had a plan to begin with, we could have simply sat back and enjoyed the fruits of our labor. Instead, we found ourselves working at least as hard as if not harder than we had the first time.
We moved into our condo about eighteen months ago. We knew that our backyard needed to be revamped but we decided to wait until we came up full time to tackle that job.
Life with an HOA
We live in a golf community on one of the fairways. It’s a beautiful place, but the HOA has control over what we can and cannot do within our yards, both front and rear. As long as we don’t increase the footprint, we are fairly safe. But we were waiting for the said HOA to do some work in both our front and rear yards. We asked if we could just tackle the project of replanting our front and rear gardens ourselves. They gave us a thumbs up.
We hired a lovely young lady and her crew to tear out and put in new plantings. The front turned out beautifully, so we asked if she’d help with the rear yard, too. We talked about the look we wanted, and we met at the nursery and picked out new plants. Beautiful new hydrangeas and azaleas were added to our landscape. Golfers stopped and commented on what an improvement we had made.
All was well until today when the mowers came to cut the grass. In our excitement over all the new plants and the new mulch and the beautiful day lilies that would bloom next year, we forgot all about the need for the mowers to go through our yard to access parts of the common areas that must be maintained. How did that happen?
No Plan
Simple. We didn’t have a plan. Well, not a real plan drawn up and showing the locations of all the plants we would put in. Some were placed too far into the path the mowers needed to take. Others would have been mown down, period. We called the president of the HOA and had him come look at our dilemma and then hubby and I set about remedying the situation.
So today, we dug up rhododendrons and azaleas, pachysandra, and daylilies and moved them out of harm’s way, and for sure, out of the path the mowers normally take. It was a lot of hard work for two people of a certain age. We didn’t have the young lady do this as she is working a huge job in another neighborhood this week. The fix fell to us. After all, we should have taken every little detail into consideration, and we did not.
All that work because we failed to do the one thing that could have prevented it. We didn’t make a plan. We just had an idea and we thought it would work out okay. If we had only asked to see a drawn-up plan, or even if we had taken the time to draw a crude rendition of what we wanted, we would have seen the obstacle course we were creating.
God Makes Plans
Even God tells us He knows the plans He has for us. Jeremiah 29:11 is one of my favorite verses in all of the Bible. I quote it to my children with frequency. Yet, I didn’t stop and heed what I knew to do. And man, are we tired tonight.
Before we began the work today, the first thing we did was stop and ask God for wisdom and discernment about how to repair the mess we had created. Most of the work that was done by our young lady and her crew remained. We did move four bushes, one pachysandra, and all those daylilies (they numbered somewhere around 70). When the mowers come next Wednesday, they will be able to do their job. And we will finally get to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our and our landscaper’s labor.
Do you always make a plan? Did you find yourself in a fix when you failed to make one? Share your experience with us.
Hi, I’m Debra
Jesus Follower, wife, BoyMom, DD, author, blogger, musician, southern cook, amateur genealogist, amateur artist, living life with an accent on Southern.
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