We either treat our leaders with blind trust and awe or with disrespect, contempt, and disgust. It is hard to find the middle ground where we honor them, recognize their limitations and humanity, and see them as temporary occupiers of a role that they will one day surrender to another.

FDR did not finish the New Deal; LBJ did not complete the architecture of a Great Society; Nixon did not give us a Just and Lasting Peace; they all left office, dead or alive, with unfinished plans.

So will we.

So will every leader. Our plans perish when they depend upon us.

On the other hand,to the extent that these and others offered plans that were part of a larger plan of God and invested in other people who caught a vision and took them to the next level with God's help and guidance, they survived.

It was not about faith in humans, but it God who guides, leads, and brings to pass.

Even, and especially, Jesus, understood and modeled this. He spent most of His ministry teaching His plan to the "next generation" of leaders and then, completed His work by dying and rising. He returned from death, gave His final lessons, and commissioned the church to take His plan and vision to all future generations.

He commissioned only a church, not a government, prince, or corporation, to execute, propagate, and lead His not-of-this-world kingdom of grace.

That is how plans survive.

"Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish."

(Psalm 146:3-4 ESV)