God's Plan?

At church this morning, during the children's part of the service, the pastor and his puppet Jake were talking about what people want to be when they grow up, and whether or not that materializes when they actually do become adults.  In some cases, it does.  One lady in the congregation as a child wanted to be a nurse like her mother, and she became a nurse, like her mother!  But there are other people who do not become what they wanted to be when they grow up.  The pastor said that this is part of God's perfect plan, and that God's plan often makes sense to us as we look back on our lives.

I've heard a number of older Christians say this sort of thing.  But there are other Christians I know who don't believe that God is shaping our lives according to a perfect plan and who see such a belief as dangerous, because it supposedly absolves people of responsibility for their own lives and disappoints them when things don't work out. 

What do I believe about this?  I don't know.  I suppose that one can see a bright side for all sorts of jobs and situations, even if they aren't what we originally wanted.  In some cases, however, it's hard to see a bright side, maybe because there isn't one.  I think here about such problems as world hunger.