Plans?

Does God move our plans forward, or do our plans move forward when they agree with His?

I've been struggling to make progress with this thought as I look through my life, especially now at the moment of putting down more roots in New Home.  Purchasing a house has brought this  thought to the fore as well, as reviewing the selling documents brings to mind the series of events that brought us here, which things brings up the series of events which brought us to that point.  So often, my life seems like a series of random accidents to which I responded, perhaps without always thinking as well as I should of.

But plans.  I had them. I have them.  I'm sure most people do.  We'd like to believe that God puts these plans into our heads and hearts so that we can execute them.  We read "Commit your work to the Lord, and He will establish your plans" in Proverbs 16:3 or 1 John 5:14  "Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us." (and yes, before you comment, I do realize this verse is not a promise to just receive every prayer we ask.). 

So we do it.  We pray and plan and study God's word and talk to people and gather data and try to move forward on these plans.  And, at least seemingly for me, they seem to go precisely nowhere.

Have plans that I made moved forward?  Sometimes.  Sometimes I think God let them move forward in spite of the fact they were silly or stupid or (occasionally) downright dangerous because He wanted to teach me the folly of thinking I knew it all.

But what about the good ones that go nowhere, the honorable and noble ones, the ones that (it seems like) really represent something God would approve of?  How do we reconcile that those don't go anywhere when our lives too often seemed trapped in things of little value and impact?

I suppose that comes down to the point of making the argument about what God's will is.  There's been plenty of ink spilled about it over the centuries.  And unless one is of the type who believe God still speaks (which He does to me occasionally, but never audibly and never in such direct terms) you'll find yourself trying to chase a will-o-the-wisp you can never catch.  Some things we can know, of course - He put them down in the Bible - but there are just as many things that we can't know.  I sometimes wonder if these are the things that He often makes those kinds of decisions on - yes, He states what He would like to us to do, but He keeps His own counsel on what is in His heart.  This perhaps we can only know by His blessing after the fact, or in Heaven itself.

Which probably gets back to the point I often find myself returning to:  is it that (once again) I've managed to ignore what He's really asking of me in order to find my justification for what I want?