You're Wal-Mart, already the largest retailer in the world. You have a chance to buy a Chinese "hypermarket" chain for $1 billion ("hypermarkets" are giant stores which sell a large variety of merchandise). The purchase will give you the biggest food and department store network in the world's most populous country. Should you do the deal? According to today's Wall Street Journal, you just did.

Meanwhile, this morning's Journal tells us that Walt Disney Co. has unveiled a companywide initiative designed to prevent the use of its characters and brands to promote unhealthy foods to kids. As obesity rates among youth soar, this plan appears to be crucial. How will they know which products to promote and which to refuse? That will be the difficult leadership issue as the initiative proceeds.

Such decisions are part and parcel of corporate leadership in today's global economy. Today leaders make decisions if they do nothing else. Good ones and bad ones determine their success and legacy (just ask Carly Fiorina). So yesterday we asked the vital question: how do we know God's will for our lives, our part in his purpose?

First we must believe that God does in fact have a plan for our lives. Some evolutionists say that life began as a chance coincidence, with no particular plan or purpose at all. Existentialists say that this life is all there is, and life is chaos. Martin Heidegger, for instance, wrote that we are actors on a stage, with no script, director, or audience, and courage is to face life as it is. Postmodernists say that truth is relative, that there is no overriding purpose to life. So, does God have a plan for us, or is life a random coincidence? In the words of Shakespeare, are we "sound and fury, signifying nothing"?

Here is God's answer: "I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future" (Jeremiah 29:11). He had a plan for where and how they should live: "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce" (v. 5). He had a plan for the families they should have: "Marry and have sons and daughters" (v. 6). He even had a plan for the country which enslaved them: "Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper" (v. 7).

A plan for where and how we live, the families we raise, and the country we inhabit--what is left out? God has a plan for every part of our lives. Romans 12:2 calls God's will "good, pleasing and perfect." How can we know this plan? Let's continue tomorrow.

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