Want Him More

 Spoiler alert: life can be just downright terrible sometimes. There can be terrible, awful, terrible things that happen all around us and it's so, so hard to see "the good." But we search desperately for it anyway.

Cancer, famine, war, orphans... in no particular order, we all can name more things than we'd like that just plain suck. And I hear a lot of people struggle to justify "how God could let this happen" or ask, "If there's a God, then why is there _____" and I'm not going to be belittling these wresting questions, nor do I claim to have the answers to them. I think they're rational questions to ask, especially for those of us who have met this AWESOME, life-changing God who is the Maker of all things good and perfect. Because when things are terrible and we lose a loved one, or we don't get the job, or we get our hearts broken, I think a natural response is to ask this good God:

"Why?" 

Or even more pressing, "What did I do to deserve this?"

Or even more desperate still, "What could I have done differently to avoid this pain?"

I think we ask these questions the most when we pray the hardest for something, and we believe whole-heartedly that God is willing and able to do "the impossible." We hear about miracles or experience them in our own lives, and we struggle when, other times, the miracle just doesn't happen. When they aren't healed, or you don't get the scholarship, or you're still single even when you thought he was "the one" you'd been praying for. 

The heartache is real. The pain is real. The grief is real. And these are okay emotions to have-- in fact, I'd venture to say God wants us to come to Him during these seasons of life.

The thing I don't think is okay is when our desire for things to "go the right way" overcome our desire for God to have His will be done. When we think "if only THIS would happen, then all would be well and good" instead of "God, I trust you as the Source of goodness in this situation. Period."

When things don't work out the way we want them to, we don't need to just pray harder, or have more faith... that would assume our circumstances are hinging upon whether or not we do the work correctly when in reality, the work has already been done on our behalf. 

God defeated death once and for all through His Son, Jesus, and it's by His grace we have access to the Father. It's through His Holy Spirit we can have a relationship that is built on trust and reliance. We don't need to just "do more" or "want God more." We need to Want Him More than our circumstances. 

What would happen if we asked bold prayers, and fully surrendered them to God out of a trust that His ways are above our ways, better than our wildest dreams and desires, and nothing we could possibly ask for would be better than what He has planned for us?

What if, even when the outcomes we see seem to be downright terrible, our faith in God's goodness is not thwarted or questioned at all? Rather, what if we clung to God so hard that we actually wanted His way, not ours, because we trusted that His way is always better?

I'm trying to reframe my brain to think this way. Because of the world I live in as a 25 year-old citizen of the United States, I've been accustomed to a certain mindset surrounding prayer and God when "things go wrong."

You've heard it, too-- that "we can have faith that moves mountains." (But it's God doing the work, right?)

Or "When God closes a door, He opens a window." (But do we really believe God's the one "closing doors" like death, illness, famine, and drought?)

The point is, there are a lot of flawed interpretations of who God is and how He works, and again, I'm not claiming to have all (or any) of the answers. 

All I know comes from my relationship with Him-- my observations about His character and the Truth He tells me through Scripture and through wise counsel. And from what I've learned, the world is a broken place and crappy stuff happens all the time, and it's not like God's causing it all to happen because He's testing us or teaching us a lesson or wants to show us the contrast between bad and good (although, from time to time, I'm sure God can do these things... I'm focusing on the "big stuff" right now.... the stuff where it's easy to doubt His goodness.)

When it's hard to believe God is good, we have to surrender the outcome to Him. What other choice do we have? As believers who put our trust in God more than anything else, we can either choose to trust our way, the way that "seems like the 'right' outcome," or we can trust God. 

We can pray to Him and He wants us to do that, but we have to want Him more than we want our situations to change.

It's when we fix our eyes on God that we find clarity for what's going on around us. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's true. Putting on the blinders and looking straight to Jesus actually clears up the world and the terrible, awful things we see each day.

Thanks be to God that our hope doesn't lie in these things!

2 Corinthians 4:18 (NIV) : So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.