The Plumbline

Do you know any troublemakers?  You know, the kind of people who just love to sit around, planning some kind of misbehavior, waiting for the moment to spring it on someone?  In the most literal sense, a troublemaker is anyone who causes difficulties, distress, or worries - kind of out of habit and with a desire to bring injury, harm, or suffering to another.  The point here is that this individual makes a habit of living to life miserable for others.  These are definitely not the kind of people we want to associate with on a regular basis! Another word for this individual is "instigator" - wherever trouble seems to be brewing, you can pretty much be assured they had something to do with it! So, out of respect for yourself, you might want to learn how to avoid these individuals as much as possible - because the end they desire differs from the end God desires for your life! A person who plans evil   will get a reputation as a troublemaker.   The schemes...

Planning is a good thing, except when we do all the planning without consulting what God might just have in mind for our lives.  Plans are a way of arranging things so a particular "scheme" comes about - we make a "schematic" of sorts.  As we formulate a plan, we are really gathering a whole bunch of thoughts around all our options.  Man does a pretty good job of gathering their thoughts, but not always the best job of sorting them out.  It is in the "sorting" process where the right answer, or best plan on how to proceed actually comes about.  Gathering thoughts is really doing nothing more than getting them all accumulated and into a place where we are ready to do something with them.  As you may well imagine, some of this "gathering" on our part is just to formulate any kind of plan so we might actually muster the strength and faculties to "deal" with the thing at hand. God expects us to do the "gathering" of all our though...