Review: Plan B

Plan B.  It’s the route your life takes when you were trying to steer it elsewhere.  Maybe an unexpected sickness.  Divorce.  Infertility.  Singlehood.  Failed Business. Job loss.  Death.  The moments in which you begin to question who God is and why he moved the Do Not Enter sign where you had firmly placed it. 

But Pete Wilson’s book Plan B doesn’t dwell in the despair of Plan B’s.  He helps you see that maybe Plan B was the right route after all.  In a word, this book is hope.  Using stories from the Bible and modern-day experiences, Pete walks the reader through all kind of feelings and perspectives of those living out Plan B.

Can I be honest and say when I picked this book up I wasn’t sure I’d get anything out of it?  Not that I doubted Pete’s abilities in the least.  I’ve learned a lot from Pete in the past and I knew he’d have a word.  I just wasn’t sure if it was one for me.  I haven’t had a catastrophic or even alternate event in my life to make me doubt God.  But let’s be clear.  Plan B is coming.  As Matthew Turner says in his review, “if you’re working on plan A, Plan B is a good prerequisite.”  But I’d take it further than that.  I may not be in Plan B right now, but there are scores of people around me that are.  And I can’t tell you the hope the book has given me that I can offer others in need that are in Plan B.  God has not forgotten us.  There is hope in our Plan B’s.

While reading, I marked several passages and thought I’d share some of my favorite talking points.

• For those in Plan B, you may feel like life is spiraling out of control.  However, in the chapter Don’t Run Pete explains, “Your dreams may not be happening, and things aren’t turning out the way you expected, but that doesn’t mean your life is spinning out of control.  It just means you’re not in control.”
• In the chapter Your Jordan, Pete says that in most Plan B situations, it is a lot like standing at side of the Jordan river with the enemy chasing you.  It seems impossible to get through alive.  The fear can be overwhelming.  He asks the reader to identify that Jordan in your life and says that your Jordan always involves fear.  The good news is God has gone before us and we shouldn’t be afraid.
• From Whiplash, “it’s often a process, not a final destination.”  He gives the example of someone not getting the job they interviewed for and the person assuming they’d missed God’s will by not getting it.  He says God may simply wanted the person to learn something from the interview.   It’s good to remember life is a process and God is in it all.
• In the chapter Whiplash, Pete reminds us to trust in the person of God and not in our circumstances.

And my favorite passage of all:

“You’ve got to stop looking at your shattered dreams and your unmet expectations as something God is doing to you.  He’s not doing something to you.  But he might be doing something through you.  He might be doing something in you.”

God wouldn’t let us go through these Plan B’s for no purpose.  I always love Beth Moore’s saying, “He’s either doing it for His glory or your benefit.”  He’s not torturing us.  He doesn’t love us less.  But He is allowing it so that we might be transformed.

I can’t recommend this book enough for everyone.  If you aren’t in Plan B, I know there is someone you can hand this to you and say, “Here’s some hope.”  I’d love to hand this copy to someone here with the gift of hope.  Leave a comment on this post and I’ll draw a random winner on Wednesday at 9pm.