In a lot of homes there is a drawer, usually the bottom one, where the plans live. A roll of drawings gone soft at the edges, held with a rubber band that snapped years ago. A floor plan sketched on graph paper at a kitchen table in 1998. A draughtsman’s elevation of a house with a wide verandah and a room marked “Mummy” in pencil. Sometimes there is a folder of magazine cuttings too: a kitchen, a front door, a bathroom with blue tiles.
Nobody opens that drawer much. It can hurt to look. The plans were drawn when the children were small and the future felt wide open. Then came school fees, a redundancy, an illness, a move abroad, a divorce, a pandemic. The land is still there, or perhaps it was sold. The drawings wait.
A prophet told to write it down
Habakkuk is one of the Bible’s most honest books. It opens with a complaint: “How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?” (Habakkuk 1:2, NIV). The prophet looks at injustice and violence in his land and cannot understand why God seems slow to act. Then he climbs up to his watchtower to wait for an answer.
When the answer comes, the first instruction is practical:
“Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come.” (Habakkuk 2:2-3, NKJV)
Write it down. Make it clear. Then wait, because the timing belongs to God.
Habakkuk’s vision was about God’s justice among the nations, not a family home. But the pattern he models, of naming the hope clearly, holding it honestly and waiting for God’s timing, is one many households know well.
Why plans on paper matter
There is something about writing a hope down that changes it. A vague wish for “a nice house someday” drifts. A drawing with three bedrooms, a water tank on the north side and a verandah facing the hills can be priced, saved for, discussed with a builder, adjusted when circumstances change. It becomes a plan rather than a daydream.
Good architects and draughtsmen say something similar. The clearer the brief, the better the house. Families who take time to write down how they actually live, who cooks, who needs quiet, who might move in later, end up with homes that fit them. Those who rush often end up with rooms nobody uses.
And written plans can be passed on. More than one family has built a house from drawings a parent made decades earlier. The vision tarried. It did not die.
When the plan needs revising
Waiting does not mean the drawings must stay exactly as they were. Sometimes the years of delay reveal that the original plan no longer fits. The four-bedroom house for a family of six may now need to be a two-bedroom home for a couple in their sixties, with a ramp and a wide shower. The second storey may no longer be wise. The land may need to be sold and the dream relocated.
That is not a failure of faith. Habakkuk himself ends his book in a very different place from where he began. By the final chapter he is saying that even if the fig tree does not blossom and there are no grapes on the vines, even if the fields produce no food and the stalls are empty, “yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Saviour” (Habakkuk 3:17-18, NIV). His hope has not shrunk. It has deepened, and moved its weight from the outcome to the God who holds it.
Taking the plans out of the drawer
If you have a drawer like that, it might be worth opening it this week. Not to feel the sting of what has not happened, but to ask some honest questions:
- Does this plan still fit the life we have now, and the life we are likely to have in ten years?
- What is the one next step, however small, that would move it forward? A survey, a conversation with a lender, a savings account opened for the purpose, a visit to the land.
- Is anything standing in the way that we have avoided dealing with, such as a title problem or a family disagreement?
- Could the vision be shared? Could a son or daughter carry it forward with us?
- If it never happens in the form we imagined, can we still rejoice in the God who gave us the hope?
Consider a widow who finally unrolls the drawings her late husband made, twenty-five years after he drew them. The house is too big now. But with her grandson, who has just qualified as a draughtsman, she redraws it as a small, sturdy cottage with one room kept for visiting family, on the same spot her husband marked with a stone. It is not the house he planned. It is the house the plan became.
“Though it tarries, wait for it.” Waiting, in Habakkuk, is not passive. It is watchful, honest, and willing to be surprised by how God brings things to pass. The plans in the drawer may yet speak.
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