For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for wholeness and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. (Jeremiah 29:11)

Being twelve is tough because you’re not quite a teenager and not through being a kid. Five years later seventeen comes along and you want to be treated like an adult. Being twelve and being thirteen have something in common – neither age likes being told what to do! Which brings us to the question, "Why do people not want God in their lives?" Because they think He is going to tell them what to do, what to think and how to live.

Jeremiah writes a letter to the people in captivity in Babylon. He says to them, "For I know the plans I have for you." The "I" refers to God and he is writing what God has told him to write. God has plans for His people, even in captivity. Those plans are for their good and for their future.

Yesterday’s devotion was about trying to make sense when life’s pieces don’t fit and trusting God because there is nothing too hard for Him. Now He is telling the same people that He has a future mapped out for them, a great future. Were you one of those people you might have replied, "Yeah, right!" in a youthful sarcastic voice because you remember being free in Israel and are now a slave in Babylon. "And you call this better God?"

There is little doubt that when life is a mess and seems to be about as bad as it can get that we want to say to God, "Keep your hands off my life!" The truth is that those people wound up as slaves because they thought they knew better than God about living life and rejected His instructions. Humans change little in their behavior and thinking. The mess we make of life isn’t His fault but ours because of the choices we make. So, we are little different than those folks in captivity.

God is loving and forgiving – even when we make a mess He says to us, "I have a plan for you. It’s a great plan full of promise and hope for your future." It’s up to us just like it was for those in captivity to choose to accept God’s offer or to reject it. A better life begins when you stop being a child of twelve or a kid of seventeen and realize God is not telling you what to do but is offering you hope and a future.