the weblog of Ian & Lauren McLaren

When BookSneeze released 500 review copies of Plan B by Nashville-based pastor Pete Wilson, the response was so overwhelming that the website actually crashed. I happened to be off that day so I was able to come back to the computer a couple hours later and request the book, but the mad rush left me feeling very curious in regards to what the book was all about and why it appeared to be in such high demand.

Then I saw the tagline and began to put the pieces together. Perhaps (and dare I say unfortunately) it’s not a surprise that many modern, Western Evangelical Christians would want to read a book that addresses the following question: what do you do when God doesn’t show up the way you thought he would?

The basic premise of the book is to examine what to do with shattered dreams, unmet expectation, what to do when your life isn’t turning out the way you thought it would – what do you do when you have to turn to Plan B? Wilson encourages the reader to see how God often does His best work in our most hopeless situations, and to ultimately to place our hope firmly in him above and beyond the shifting circumstances of life.

My sense is that people will be drawn to this book because it presupposes a Plan A that revolves around personal success and happiness (a happy marriage, happy and healthy children, financial stability etc), and as the ways of the dominant social, cultural and political powers have become increasingly embedded into what we perceive to be the Way of Jesus, the lines between what we perceive to be ‘the life God has for us’ and the true path of discipleship have become so blurred that when our Plan A expectations fall apart, we are left paralyzed and unsure of where to turn. While Wilson – through a deep gift of storytelling and by way of biblical interpretation – is able to respond to these questions in ways that will offer encouragement and hope to the reader, my problem with this is that we seem to be asking the wrong questions.

Rather than asking what we do with these unmet expectations and shattered dreams, perhaps we should be questioning whether or not these expectations and dreams are truly in line with the Way of Jesus in the first place.

Take, for example, what Wilson refers to as ‘the ultimate Plan B’: Jesus has just been crucified, and his disciples are left wondering how their Messiah could have possibly ended up on a Roman cross. The problem, of course, is that their expectations of what a Messiah should be were askew. They were hoping for one that would overthrow the Roman Empire and vindicate God’s chosen people; their Plan A revolved around success and power, but what they got instead was weakness and death. What they failed to see was that “the way of (Jesus) is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the downward mobility ending on the cross … (a Way) in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest.” (Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus.)

Wilson, no doubt, is on to this, and the best bits of the book are those where he questions our expectations, and even go so far as to call them idols. Chapter 10 was a big highlight of the book for me, wherein he offers up these solid quotes:

One of the things I believe God is teaching me in my life these days is that at times we want our dreams more than we want God. We want what God does for us instead of just God. (143)

And I think for those of us in the midst of a Plan B we’ll discover that one of our idols all along has been a picture of the way life should be be. Our idol was an expectation or a dream. (155)

It’s possible, in other words, that part of the reason you feel so shattered and so broken in the midst of your Plan B situations is that you gave your love and devotion to your plans and dreams instead of God. (156)

However, this book appears to be so sold on the Plan B metaphor that it gets caught in this constant tension between the upward mobility of our Plan A’s and the downward mobility of the cross, allowing it to ultimately lend itself to the brand of comfortable and self-focused North American Christianity that (sadly) we all know and love.

In other words, in reading this book, I did not feel a push to imagine a different way, to be called out of the old and into something new by looking past ourselves and entering into the brokenness and suffering of others. Disciples of Jesus are to be defined by their capacity to love the other, and it is this relentless love of the other that sets the kingdom of God apart from any other way the world can know.

I would suggest that perhaps it would be more helpful if we were to ask the following questions: a) how can we re-frame our expectations in order to more fully embrace the Way of Jesus and the downward mobility of the cross?; and b) how can we as the church more effectively and meaningfully enter into the brokenness and suffering of others so that we might become the kind of loving community that embodies the Kingdom among us as opposed to mirroring the world around us?

I believe that as we wrestle with these questions and seek to embody the answers to them, we might begin to experience the communion with God and with others that is necessary in order to sustain our faith in the midst of whatever might come our way.

In short, I would say that there were moments in Plan B that truly did speak to me, where I felt both challenged and encouraged in regards to keeping a proper, God-centred perspective through both the worries and blessings of every-day life. At the same time, it left me longing for a push to move beyond self and come alongside the other in the midst of their brokenness and suffering, a push that the church today so desperately and constantly needs.

*Note: This book was provided free of charge from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze book review bloggers program.