But I Know Who Holds Tomorrow.

We are going away on holiday next week. Just five days in Dorset (a couple of hours drive from us), near the beach, with a pool and a barbecue and the kind of walks that make you feel human again.

We have been looking forward to it for weeks. The boys keep asking how many more sleeps.

And then I checked the forecast. Rain. Every single day...

The boys are too small to care, but I'm feeling a bit down as the trip I had pictured has started to dissolve before we've even packed a bag. We have spent the last few days a little gloomy about a week that has not even arrived yet.

But I keep having to remind myself of one simple thing. It has not rained. Not one drop. We are sad about a forecast. A guess. A best estimate from someone looking at a map five days out, the kind that shifts by the hour and is wrong about as often as it is right.

I am grieving rain that may never fall. And even if I spend the whole week braced for it, the weather will do exactly what it was always going to do, whether I worry about it or not.

The only thing my worrying actually touches is today. It quietly drains the joy out of the week before the week has even begun.

I do not know what next week holds. I can guess. I can refresh the app. But I do not actually know, and neither does anyone else. We treat the forecast like a verdict, when really it is just a fog we are squinting into.

David had far more than rain to worry about. He was surrounded by enemies, slandered, conspired against, his life genuinely in danger. And in the middle of all of it, in Psalm 31:15, he prayed a single line I needed to hear this week.

"My times are in Your hand."

Not in the forecast. Not in the worst case I keep rehearsing in my head. In God's hand. He holds the real days, the ones that actually come, not the ones I have already imagined and mourned.

And the trip was never really about the weather anyway. What we are longing for is to be together, away from the usual rush.

The sea will still be there in the rain. The boys will still find puddles to jump in. A barbecue under a gazebo still tastes like a barbecue.

Some of our best days have happened when the plan fell apart and we ended up inside, all of us, laughing, with nowhere else to be.

So I am trying to hand the week back. To stop paying for tomorrow's rain with today's peace.

I may not know what next week holds, sun or showers or both at once. But I know Who holds it. And He has never once needed the forecast to be good to be good to us.