Better Than Plan A

A Year-End Message About the Redemptive Genius of God in Our Worst Mistakes

We’re on the precipice of a new year, and with the transition often comes a sense of anticipation. However, for many people, the annual curtain raises painful feelings of disappointment, regret, and uncertainty. And nestled in those big feelings is a lie that sounds reverent on the surface but breeds torment beneath it.

The lie goes like this: God had a perfect plan for your life, and if you had obeyed perfectly, moved sooner, chosen better, or just not messed up when you did, you would’ve been living it by now. It’s subtle, but poisonous, because once that belief takes root, regret becomes your interpreter, and God becomes a silent bystander to the fallout of your own decisions.

And so, instead of trusting His voice in the present, you start rewriting your past in your mind, obsessing over the mistakes you made, the delays you caused, and the open doors you failed to walk through. You spend your days wondering if what you’re now living is a lesser version of what could have been. A shadow. A salvage job. A disappointing Plan B.

But the real tragedy is not what you lost; it’s the way you now see the character of the Lord.

If I’m being honest, I know this lie intimately. It’s been the soundtrack to some of my deepest regrets. I’ve stared at lost opportunities and whispered to myself, “That was it. That was the one. I blew it. I’ll never get that chance again.” And yet, somewhere deeper still, the Spirit of God keeps pressing on the rubble of my what-ifs, whispering, “Do you really believe My purpose for your life is so fragile that it depends on your perfection? And that I don’t factor in the human condition?”

This is not a message about self-esteem. It’s not a psychological balm for missed opportunities. It’s a confrontation with the redemptive genius of God. Because either He’s sovereign and wise enough to account for your failures in His purposes, or He isn’t Lord at all. And if He is, then your future is not the fragile outcome of your perfection. It is the robust result of His providence.

Providence Is Not Plan B

Romans 8:28 is one of the most quoted—and most misunderstood—verses in the Bible. Here’s Paul: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” People tend to quote it as comfort for hard times or a shallow balm for heartbreak. But this verse is not meant to sanitize disappointment. It is meant to reframe reality.

The Greek phrase “work together” is synergeō, from which we get the word synergy. But this isn’t a mutual partnership. It’s not God working with you on equal terms. This is divine orchestration. God is not reacting to your circumstances. He is weaving them. The Text doesn’t say all things are good. It says that all things are subject to His hand, His wisdom, and His eternal purpose. Even the things you regret. Even the ones you caused. And yes, even the consequences of what you chose with eyes wide open.

But don’t miss this: Paul is not making a blanket promise. He is speaking to a specific people—“those who love God” and “are called according to His purpose.” In other words, those who are surrendered to His lordship and those who live yielded to His hand of training. For them, even what appears to be failure is not wasted. But this doesn’t happen by default. It happens by surrender and repentance. By letting Him be the Author and Finisher of your faith instead of trying to rescue your own plotline.

And so, to say that God works all things together for good is not to say that every choice we make is good. It is to say that God’s sovereign goodness is not defeated by the reality of our brokenness, that His wisdom is not overwhelmed by our weakness, and that His providence doesn’t retreat when our decisions go sideways. He doesn’t just work around the damage. He works through it. Why? Because He’s not discovering your future as it unfolds. He’s declaring it. Isaiah 46:10 says He “declares the end from the beginning,” not because He predicts well, but because He reigns over time itself. There has never been a moment in your story that caught Him off guard. What shocks you was already spoken by Him. His providence is not sequential. It is sovereign.

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The Fall Was Not a Surprise

This truth is built into the very architecture of redemption. Before there was a cross, there was a garden. And before there was sin, there was a Lamb “slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8, NKJV). Think about that. Before Adam and Eve ever made a poor choice, before the serpent ever whispered, and before rebellion ever entered the bloodstream of humanity, God had already accounted for it. In fact, allow me to say this to you as clearly as I know how: The cross was not a divine reaction to human sin. It was a preexisting solution. The plan of redemption was not hastily assembled in the fallout of Genesis 3. It was anchored in the eternal wisdom of God before time began.

But this doesn’t mean God authored the choice Adam and Eve made, either. He does not tempt with evil (James 1:13), nor does He delight in sin. But in His omniscience and sovereignty, He permitted it, not because sin was necessary for His glory, but because His glory is so expansive that it includes the ability to redeem what He never desired.

This is the staggering brilliance of our great God. He is not the author of sin, but He is the architect of redemption. What He never approved, He can still absorb, and what He never initiated, He can still transform. When human beings detonate their own peace, God does not panic. He takes what the enemy meant for evil and, through mystery and mercy, brings forth good that could only be attributed to Him.

That doesn’t justify rebellion or soften the wages of sin. But it should utterly dismantle the lie that your failure has permanently disqualified you from God’s best. His purposes are not dependent on your uninterrupted obedience, for if they were, I suspect He would have chosen a different species to bear His image.

When We Ruin the Story

Look through the canon of Scripture, and you won’t find a lineup of flawless execution. You’ll find a catalogue of people who failed, and a God who didn’t. Abraham was promised an heir and a legacy, but instead of waiting, he slept with Hagar, trying to manufacture the promise on his own timeline. The result? Family disaster. But did that cancel God’s plan? No. Isaac still came. The covenant remained. The promise was not voided by Abraham’s impatience.

Don’t forget Moses. Moses murdered a man and fled into obscurity for forty years. By the time God met him in the burning bush, he wasn’t a rising leader—he was a fugitive buried in regret. But that’s the man God used to lead a nation out of bondage. And when God called to Moses from the bush, He didn’t say “murderer” or “failure.” He said, “Moses. Moses.” The same name Moses likely tried to forget. The name attached to shame. But Almighty God used it again, because the wilderness does not erase your identity. God doesn’t rename you after your mistake. He re-speaks the name He gave you before it.

And what about David? David, the man after God’s own heart, used his power to exploit Bathsheba and orchestrated the death of her husband. The consequences were catastrophic. And yet, Solomon—born from that same union—would build the temple, pen Proverbs, and carry the Messianic line forward.

Then, there’s Peter. Peter denied Christ three times. Not once. Thrice. He cursed and distanced himself. He folded under pressure. But Jesus didn’t throw Peter away. He restored him. He gave him back his voice. And on the day of Pentecost, it was Peter—not John, the disciple whom Jesus loved—who preached the gospel to the nations for the very first time.

Still not convinced? If you think God only redeems the cleaned-up chapters of your story, look no further than the genealogy of Jesus. In Matthew 1, God doesn’t airbrush the bloodline of His Son. He includes liars and prostitutes, foreigners and failures. Rahab the harlot. Tamar, who seduced her father-in-law. Ruth, the Moabite outsider. Bathsheba—whose name isn’t even mentioned, only that she was “the wife of Uriah.” God includes them all. Why? Because the scandal of redemption is that He doesn’t need a perfect story to produce a perfect Savior. He folds rebellion into redemption, not to glorify the past, but to showcase the invincibility of His grace.

What do these stories have in common? Not one of them glorifies the failure. All of them showcase the faithfulness of God. Each narrative holds the tension that sin has consequences, but grace has a louder voice. Brokenness is real, but it is not final. God doesn’t just tolerate our failure; He factors it in without ever violating His holiness.

Grace That’s Smarter Than Us

We live in a world dominated by cause and effect. Make the right choice, reap the right result. Make the wrong one, live with the consequences. And yes, there is truth in this. Choices matter. Obedience matters. Wisdom matters. Sowing and reaping is wired into the natural order. But grace disrupts the equation. It reminds us that the outcomes of your life are not limited to your performance.

That’s why you don’t get what you deserve. You get what God, in His mercy and wisdom, has determined to give. Romans 5:20 says that where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, not as a license to sin, but as a witness to the overwhelming goodness of God. Grace doesn’t just forgive; it floods. It overruns. It silences the lie that your mistake was the end. Grace makes you a walking contradiction: someone who should have forfeited everything, yet still walks in purpose.

Paul said that God’s power is made perfect not in our intelligence, not in our strategic planning, but in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). And that weakness isn’t just circumstantial, it’s existential. It’s our utter inability to navigate life apart from Him. And yet, His grace meets us right there, not to excuse our folly, but to empower us to live again.

At the same time, grace is not passive. It doesn’t dismiss our growth or maturity. Rather, it trains us. It teaches us to say no to ungodliness and live self-controlled, upright lives in the present age (Titus 2:11-12). Grace, as Dallas Willard said, is not opposed to effort—it is opposed to earning. That means that your story will not be salvaged by trying harder. It will be re-authored when you surrender to the One who never dropped the pen.

Your House Is Not the Hero

Now, this is where the theology becomes personal. Last year, I bought a house—my dream house, really. It was a brick ranch on a corner lot in the neighborhood in which I grew up. I walked through it, envisioned a future in it, fell in love with the gorgeous bay window that opened to a southern exposure, and felt the deep knowing that this was it. But through a series of events regarding some financial unknowns, and a possible underestimation in my estimated taxes, the deal fell through. And I’ve replayed the moment a hundred times. Probably more. I still drive past that house regularly and chastise myself, saying, “That was your one shot. You’ll never find that again.” And if I’m really honest, the grief still sits heavy.

But lately, I’ve begun to ask a different question. What if that house wasn’t the hero of the story? What if what felt like the perfect opportunity was never going to carry the kind of future I assumed it would? Or, what if the Lord, in His kindness, withheld it—not to punish me, but to preserve me for something else?

That’s what I tell myself on a good day, at least.

Here’s my point: Regret will try to convince you that your delay destroyed your destiny. But maybe what looked like a delay was divine protection. Maybe the loss that broke your heart was the mercy that kept it. Maybe in my case, that house was not the prize, but rather, a checkpoint. And the real story, the one God is writing, has not been disrupted. It’s still being authored, in time, in wisdom, and in love.

Or…maybe I’ll never know why it slipped through my fingers. Maybe there won’t be a moment when it all makes sense. But even then, I will say this: if the Lord is my Shepherd, I lack nothing—not even what I thought I couldn’t live without (Psalm 23:1).

Moreover, in Joel 2:25, God makes a staggering promise to a devastated people: “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.” Not the crops. Not just the resources. The years. What kind of God can redeem time itself? What kind of wisdom is able to restore seasons you thought were wasted, relationships you thought were ruined, opportunities you thought were gone forever? Only a God who is not bound by time, but Lord over it. You do not serve a God who merely makes the best of what’s left. You serve a God who restores what was lost in ways you would never have thought to pray for.

In fact, this is what Jeremiah saw at the potter’s house. The vessel was marred in the potter’s hand, but the potter didn’t throw it away. He reworked it on the same wheel.

God doesn’t discard lives because of cracks. He remakes them with the same hands, in the same place, with even greater purpose than before. The very space where you were broken may become the very ground where you’re rebuilt.

The Future You Can’t See Is Still His

One of the most haunting questions we ask ourselves is, “What if I missed it?” But that question only has teeth if you believe that God’s will is as fragile as your performance. And it isn’t. The future is not a tightrope. It is a path; a path marked by the footsteps of a Shepherd who knows how to lead you even when you forget how to follow.

Psalm 37:23–24 says, “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and He delights in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the Lord upholds him with His hand” (NKJV). God doesn’t promise you won’t stumble. He promises you won’t be thrown down. You may fall, yes. You may veer. But you are still being held by the hand of your Good Shepherd.

And no, this doesn’t mean that everything that happens to you is divinely designed, either. Not everything that happens in life is God’s will. Some things are permitted, not authored. Some things happen because we weren’t listening, or we weren’t ready. But even then, the Lord does not abandon the story. He doesn’t rewrite your life in panic. He leads you forward in sovereignty. He doesn’t approve of your missteps, but He is still Lord in their wake. His presence is not delayed. His leadership is not confused. And His goodness is not suspended.

The Better You Didn’t Choose

There’s a humility required to accept that God’s plans are better than yours. Not just morally better. Not just eternally better. But circumstantially, practically, tangibly better, even when it feels like your decisions destroyed everything. The truth is, you may not get to see the full redemption arc in this life. Hebrews 11 reminds us that many of the faithful “died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar” (v. 13). Their hope wasn’t in outcomes. It was in the One who authored them.

We love to quote Job 42:10, which says, “And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job… and gave him twice as much as he had before.” But Job’s restoration isn’t a formula to follow. It’s not a promise that if you suffer long enough, you’ll get a promotion and a house upgrade. What makes Job’s ending holy is not what he received, but who he saw. Here’s Job: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5, ESV). You see, the true reward of God’s redemptive power is not just in what He might return to you, but in how clearly you’ll see Him by the end. Sometimes, my friend, the better ending isn’t more stuff. It’s more of Him.

So no, this isn’t a promise that you’ll get the house back. Or the job. Or the relationship. It’s not a promise of circumstantial restoration. It’s a promise of sovereign redemption, which is infinitely more trustworthy because it means that you can stop trying to reverse-engineer your life.

You don’t need to relive every choice and wonder what might have been. You need to trust the One who knows how to make something out of the very dust you collapsed in.

He is not trying to get you back to the version of the future you think you missed. He is leading you into a future you didn’t know to ask for. One where the pain is still real. One where the loss still matters. But one where the outcome is better than what you would’ve chosen for yourself in your strongest moment.

Psalm 139:16 says that all the days ordained for you were written before one of them came to be. That includes the ones you regret—the seasons you’d erase if you could. But God saw them. He allowed them. And He still chose you.

Whether or not you realize it just yet, you are not limping through a damaged version of your life. You are walking through a story that is still being sovereignly told. This is the God we serve. He is the God Who sees the end from the beginning. He is the God Who does not waste pain. He’s the God Who doesn’t need your perfection to accomplish His purposes, and the God who doesn’t just forgive failure, but transforms it. He is the God Who takes what was meant for harm and folds it into good. And He is the God Who takes the broken road and builds something eternal out of it.

You didn’t ruin your story. You didn’t forfeit the plan. You haven’t missed your only chance. If you belong to the Lord, even your worst moments are not wasted. They are factored in, and the outcome will not be second best.

Let’s rehearse it again: you belong to the Lord.

And so, what is ahead will be better than Plan A, because it will be authored by grace. And grace is never late. Romans 11:29 says, “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (ESV). That means your detour didn’t void your design, nor did delay cancel your calling. When God marks your life with purpose, it’s not contingent on uninterrupted progress; it’s rooted in His unchanging nature. And it’s His nature (His character and ways) that we are invited to discover. You may be living in the long way around, but the original call still holds. He hasn’t rescinded the assignment. He hasn’t torn up the blueprints. You’re still the one He wants for the task He planned—flaws, scars, and all.

Maybe one of the clearest pictures of God’s redemptive genius unfolds on the Emmaus road. I think this illustration will help me close this teaching out. Two disciples, blinded by grief and regret, walk away from what they think was the failed story of Jesus. They narrate their disappointment aloud, saying, “We had hoped that He was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21, ESV). But redemption had already happened. They just couldn’t see it yet. Jesus walks with them, undetected, and only after breaking bread do their eyes open to what was true all along. The lesson? God’s redemptive work is often hidden in real time. You will walk for miles thinking you’re lost, only to realize later that you were walking with Resurrection Himself the whole time.

My friend, the road you’re walking today may be the very one that leads you into the clearest vision of Him you’ve ever known.

Hold tight. He Who began a good work in you will be faithful to bring it to pass.

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