Plans

I’ve been a pretty big fan of The Killers and their frontman Brandon Flowers for at least the last two decades or so. I love all their albums (if in different ways) and I’m a big fan of both of Flowers’ solo projects. I’ve seen The Killers live once and it would rank near the top of all the concerts I’ve ever attended. I grew up in the era of big stadium rock bands and in many ways I’ve never really left it. A nostalgic middle-aged cliche in so many ways, I know. Although the other day while watching a World Cup match I couldn’t help but chuckle at the sight of a couple of kids who couldn’t have been much older than ten gleefully belting out the lyrics to Mr. Brightside. My heart was happy.

Having said all this, I can’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed to hear the musical direction of Flowers’ forthcoming third solo album. Country. Yep, twangy steel guitars, warbling, plaintive melodies, harmonicas, the whole show. To which my first reaction was. Sigh. I really don’t like country music. As if anticipating this response, Flowers even released something of an apologia for all his rock fans. This isn’t forever… I’ll come back to stadium rock… We can’t all be confined to one small box forever, etc. Yeah, ok. I guess. But can’t you just come up with a kind of Mr. Brightside 2.0?

I’ve been listening to the first single from the album over the last few weeks. It’s called “Plans.” I still can’t say I love the style (although it’s growing on me). A rhinestone cowboy I will never be. But the lyrics, as always, are intriguing. It’s basically a song about the plans we make and the road life ends up taking us and how these don’t always look the same. 

Tonight I’m on the road
With the plans I drew up years ago
So hold me in your arms
I think I’m going under
Take your time with my heart
It’s been rattled by the thunder
Of the all you got engine
Always bound for the big show
Drowning out the plans I drew up years ago.

Brandon Flower is a middle-aged man and middle-aged men (and women) often tend to reflect in certain directions. We look back to the plans (such as they were) of our youth, where we imagined we might be at this stage of life, what we imagined we might have accomplished, where we thought we might be, how we thought we might be thought of. Or just some vague amalgam of all of above and more. Maybe it’s just a general sense, an impression of what we thought our lives would be like. And then we look at our actual lives. And we notice a difference.

This noticing can happen in any number of cliched directions: career, marriage, kids, waistline, hairline, social network, bank account, experiences accumulated… The list is long. Even if we never drew up formal plans for the future, it can be easy to look around at this stage of life and think, “this isn’t what I expected.” Maybe our hearts have been “rattled by the thunder”—life has thrown us a few curveballs we didn’t anticipate, perhaps even a few gut punches. Maybe we feel un- or under-prepared for what life has demanded and will demand of us. Maybe faith feels different around mid-life than it did when the plans were being drawn up (spoiler: it should). There are all kinds of ways it can feel like the plans we drew up years ago are being/have been drowned out by the actual course our lives have taken.

Flowers’ song is mostly descriptive not prescriptive. There is a plea for comfort (“Hold me in your arms, I think I’m going under) and there’s a kind of cathartic releasing in lines like,

I’m gonna roll the windows down
Let the wind wash over me
Let the whole thing go
Let it all play out like a melody

But I think the general idea is to give expression to a pretty common human experience. Which is good, so far as it goes.

If there were a list of the top five passages of Scripture whose context is regularly steamrolled over in attempt to squeeze it through the narrow gate of individualistic concerns, Jeremiah 29:11 would surely be at the top of the list:

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

These words were not written to nostalgic mid-lifers looking wistfully back on the course of their individual journeys with country music bleeding out of their headphones. They were written to an ancient people, to weary exiles, to a nation (not individuals), to people whose existence and identity was defined by a covenant made with God. We probably too quickly and too eagerly shrink and reframe these words to make them about us and our individual concerns.

And yet. Scripture can speak in more than one direction, can’t it? I think we all have a burning desire to believe that our lives are part of a bigger plan. That it’s not just a random list of happenings with our name at the top of the page. That our individual stories, with all their blunders and re-routings and failures and dead-ends are part of some larger Story, some bigger Plan that can put the plans we drew up years ago in their proper place. A Plan that can heal and redeem, bless and honour, judge and forgive. 

Wash over us. Play out like a melody. Even an unfamiliar one.