What to do When God's Plan Feels Stupid
Oct 01, 2025
Welcome to The Laws of Peace, where you will learn how to understand and apply God's laws in simple ways so that you can take small steps to create big changes and miracles and become the person you are always meant to be.
The answers are in the scriptures.
Let me show you how to find them.
Today's episode is called What to Do When God's Plan Feels Stupid.
Maybe that's never happened to you.
It's happened to me.
I want to start with a story.
We're going to start with the story of Naaman from 2nd Kings 5.
Now, remember, Naaman was a leper, and he was a really good guy.
In verse 1 of 2nd Kings 5, it says that he was a mighty man in valor, but he was also a leper, and his wife's maid knew about Jesus and told her about Jesus.
And so he wrote a letter.
He sent this letter to the prophet with lots of money and clothes and everything, and he said, Help me.
And the prophet was a little bit stressed out.
So what happened was Naaman actually came with his horses and his chariots, and he stood at the door, the house of Elisha.
And this is where we're going to catch the story starting in verse 10.
And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying, Go and wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shall be cleaned.
Now listen to how Naaman responds to that.
But Naaman was wroth and went away and said, Behold, I thought he will surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord God and strike his hand over the place and recover the leper.
He had an interesting expectation, didn't he?
And then he said, Well, aren't the Abana and the Pafar and the Damascus river better than all the waters of Israel?
May I not wash in them and be clean?
So he turned away and he went away in rage.
And his servants came near and spake to him and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee to do some great thing, wouldst thou have not done it?
How much rather than when he said to thee, wash and be clean?
Then he went down and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God, and his flesh came again into the flesh like a little child, and he was clean.
So the miracle happened.
Now, there's a million lessons in this story, but we're going to focus on one specific one, and that is that Naaman was in resistance when he was ready for his miracle.
He expected it to look a certain way, and it didn't, and it made him mad.
And he's like, well, this is dumb.
I'm not doing this.
I mean, he's like, this isn't, it's not supposed to be like this.
And that's what resistance is.
It's not supposed to be like this, and that limits our capacity to receive, and it blocks the supply.
We're working on the law of supply this month, and we want to open ourselves up to receive, but when we're saying, eh, this isn't right, it's not supposed to be like this.
It's blocking that.
When Naaman let go of how he thought it should be an accepted God's will, he received his miracle.
I want to repeat that because it's really important for you in your life.
When Naaman let go of how he thought it should be and accepted God's will, he received his miracle.
I want to jump to another story.
Elder Uchtdorf explains his story so well, so we're just going to quote Elder Uchtdorf in his talk, The Prodigal and the Road that Leads Home.
He talks about the older prodigal son, and this is what he said.
Well, almost everyone is overjoyed at the son's return.
The older brother is not.
He is carrying some emotional baggage.
He was there when his brother demanded his inheritance.
He witnessed firsthand the massive weight of grief on his father.
Ever since his brother left, he has tried to lift his father's burden.
Every day, he works to restore his father's broken heart.
And now the reckless child is back, and people can't stop lavishing attention on his rebellious brother.
All these years, he tells his father, never once have I refused to do a single thing you asked.
Yet in all that time, you never celebrated me.
The loving father responds, Dear son, all that I have is yours.
This is not about comparing rewards or celebrations.
This is about healing.
This is the moment we have been hoping for all these years.
Your brother was dead and is alive again.
He was lost, and now he is found.
One of the things that Elder Uchtdorf says that's really important, and he said, he said, this is about healing, and healing comes when we let go of the resistance.
It's not supposed to be like this, and we open ourselves to accept what might have been in the past.
We accept what's happening in our lives now.
We accept what might be happening in the future.
And we trust God with our pain.
We let it go.
We give it to him.
There's a quote that I want to share.
That is one of my very favorite quotes from a book, Edwin Gaines, in her book, The Four Spiritual Laws of Prosperity.
She's hilarious.
I love this book.
This is what she said.
When you have a problem with someone, it's almost always because they are not behaving the way that you want them to behave.
Well, they're going to behave the way that they are going to behave no matter what you think.
Once you accept that and love them just the way they are without judgment as God does, then you will have achieved forgiveness.
So I ask you, where in your life are you in forgiveness?
Where are you saying it's not supposed to be like this?
They're not supposed to be like this.
I'm not supposed to be like this.
That resistance blocks the supply.
What if your resistance is towards God?
Have you ever been frustrated because it felt like it was slow to receive the answers?
Or you prayed for something really, really good, and it didn't happen?
Well, what about when you try your hardest to do everything right, and then everything still falls apart?
Isn't keeping the commandments supposed to protect you or your family?
Right?
The resistance is a real thing.
I want to share a story with you.
Several years ago, my daughter, she grew up.
When she was little, she loved the gospel.
In fact, when she was a sunbeam, which is the three-year-old class at church, she asked her teacher for a Book of Mormon.
And all of her growing up here, she said, Mom, I'm going to be a missionary.
And when she grew up, she had the opportunity to serve in her dream place.
If there was one place she could serve a mission more than any other place she wanted to go to France.
And her mission was Paris, France.
And she went and her mission was hard, very, very difficult.
People didn't believe in God.
People made fun of her, some difficult companions.
This was back before they had GPS.
They were allowed to have GPS on her phone.
And so people would give her bogus addresses and they would spend hours pouring over an old map of the city trying to find where they were supposed to be.
And because her mission was so challenging, Alicia decided that what she was going to do was she was just going to focus on the miracles that God sent her.
And so every week she would write home about the miracles.
And she insisted that I share those on Facebook because she wanted everybody to know that God provided miracles in our lives.
And while she was there, she met her husband.
He was her zone leader.
And when they came home, they dated, and then they got married in the temple.
And she was so committed to the Lord.
And then one day, while my husband and I were getting ready to go out on our date, we received a family text, and it was from our sweet Alicia.
And she said, the church no longer aligns with our values, and we will no longer be a part of it.
And immediately we reached out and told her how much we loved her.
And then we decided to go on our date.
So my husband and I were sitting in the Sizzler, and we were both just crying.
We just looked at each other and cried.
It's not supposed to be like this.
We kept the commandments.
We did our church callings.
We had family home evening.
We had family prayer.
She loved the gospel.
She grew up and went on a mission.
It's not supposed to be like this.
And so I spent a year telling God, I thought his plan was stupid.
Every day I would wake up and I would pray, and I'd say, Heavenly Father, your plan is stupid.
This is supposed to be a plan of happiness.
This is supposed to be a plan where things work out.
And I was so distraught and so caught up in my grief.
And I had a few experiences that really helped me to move through that.
But one experience was more powerful than them all.
And I'd like to share that with you.
I was reading in one of my favorite books, which is The Infinite Atonement by Todd Callister.
And I was reading about the Savior and his atonement.
And this was really interesting to me because there's this quote, and I could not read this quote without crying.
This is a quote by Melvin Ballard, and he's Melvin J.
Ballard.
And he's talking about when the Savior preformed the atonement
He said when he was commenting on the father's choice not to rescue his son, God heard the cry of his son in that moment of great grief and agony in the garden when it is said, the pores of his body opened and drops of blood stood upon him and he cried out, father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me.
I ask you what father and mother could stand by and listen to the cry of their children in distress in this world and not render aid and assistance.
We cannot stand by and listen to those cries without it touching our hearts.
The Lord has not given us the power to save our own.
He has given us faith and we submit to the inevitable, but he has power to save and he loved his son and he could have saved him.
He saw that his son finally upon Calvary, he saw his body stretched out upon the wooden cross, he saw the cruel nails driven through the hands and feet and the blows that broke the skin and tore the flesh and let out the life's blood of his son.
He looked upon that.
In the case of our father, the knife was not stayed, but it fell and the life's blood of his beloved son went out.
His father looked on with great grief and agony over his beloved son until there seems to have come a moment when even our Savior cried out in despair, my God, my God, why has the forsaken me?
In that hour, I think I can see our dear father behind the veil looking upon these dying struggles until even he could not endure it any longer.
And like the mother who bids farewell to her dying child, has to be taken out of the room so as not to look upon the last struggles.
So he bowed his head and hid in some part of his universe, his great heart almost breaking for the love that he had for his son.
Oh, in that moment when he might have saved his son, I thank him and praise him that he did not fail us, for he had not only the love of his son in mind, but he also had the love of us.
Interestingly, as you turn the page in this book to the next story, it's the story of Abraham and Isaac.
And this is also a fascinating story because Abraham himself was almost sacrificed to satanic gods.
His dad was going to sacrifice him as a child, and he was saved by angels at the last minute.
And so he understood more than anybody what it was like to be on the altar.
And the fact that God asked him to sacrifice his son, the son that was the promise of all of the promises that Abraham was about to receive, I thought to myself, how can we trust a god that would ask so much of somebody?
How do we trust him?
How do we trust a god that when things don't work out?
And then I remembered what I just read about Melvin J.
Ballard and about how this heavenly father had the power to save his son, and he didn't.
He didn't, and the reason he didn't is because he stuck to the plan.
The plan was that the Savior would atone for our sins, and no matter how hard it was for a heavenly father, no matter how hard it was for the Savior, they went through with it because of us.
And so we can trust Heavenly Father and his plan.
And when we're in the game, I like to look at it like a football game.
We're in quarter two, and we're behind, and we're frustrated, we're upset, and we're going, wait a minute.
This isn't how it's supposed to be.
This is a stupid plan.
I'm supposed to win this game.
We're forgetting that the game isn't over yet.
We're not even half time yet.
And that we're being invited to trust the Lord and His plan.
And when we keep saying, it's not supposed to be like this, or we try to fix it, or we step into other people's lives when we're not guided by the Spirit, but because we're afraid of what might go wrong, we're mucking up the plan.
And there has to come a day where we take a step back, we take a deep breath, and we go, wait a minute.
God has a plan.
I think I'll trust the plan.
And when I got to that point, when I had that epiphany, after that, I stopped worrying.
After that, I stopped being upset.
After that, I stopped being so frustrated all the time.
And ironically, the blessing that came from that is a closer family.
My children have drawn closer to me as I've let go of these expectations, that they have to show up a certain way, that they have to live their lives a certain way.
Now, do I wish that they were a part of the church 100 percent?
Do I believe that that will happen someday?
Probably.
Yes.
I believe that God has a plan for all of my children, no matter what they choose, and that he's a part of that, and he will guide them and lead them.
But ultimately, they get to choose for themselves.
And we trust that and we trust God and we trust his plan.
The invitation I have for you today is, again, to look at where in your life are you saying, this isn't right.
It's not supposed to be like this.
And where do you need to accept what is?
And where do you need to trust the Lord a little bit more?
In Romans 8 verse 31, 35 and 38 and 39, it says, What shall we say to these things?
If God before us, who can be against us?
Right?
On those days when you feel discouraged, on those days when you feel frustrated, on those days when heaven feels silent, what should we say for these things?
If God before us, who can be against us?
God is on our side.
He's in the middle of it.
He has a plan.
We can't see the end from the beginning, but we can trust his plan.
And then in verse 35 and 38, who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?
For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come.
Nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
When we choose to accept, when we choose to trust, when we choose to believe, we can wade through the worry and we can wade through the pain and we can find our way through with the peace that the Lord wants us to have and remembering that he has a plan for us.
Thank you so much for being here.
If you have enjoyed this podcast, will you share it with somebody?
Again, thanks for being here.
Have an amazing day.
