This past Sunday I preached a sermon entitled “Not Quite What I Was Planning.” In the sermon I threw in a quick, spur of the moment line from the movie “Dan in Real Life.” I wanted to give the full quote today. at the end of the movie Dan’s weekly article has gone into syndication and here is his first national piece.

Dear Readers, for most of you, this is my first column in your paper. In the future, I will be answering your questions, but today I want to break from my usual format and talk to you about the subject of plans. Not so much my plan for this column, but life plans, and how we all make them. And how we hope that our kids make good, smart, safe plans of their own. But if we’re really honest with ourselves, our plans usually don’t work out as we had hoped. So instead of asking our young people “What are you plans? What do you plan to do with your life?” maybe we should tell them this: Plan to be surprised.