Getting What We Want

Sometimes I know exactly what I want, and when I do I want to get it and get it now. Sometimes it seems like I am not exactly sure what I want, and yet I still want it and want it now. Sometimes I even expect to get what I want, to feel that I have a right to it. When I feel like this and don't get what I want , I get frustrated and upset. When expectations fall apart negativity rises from the rubble.

All to often we slip into believing the fantasy that because we have sobered up and cleaned up, because we have found and are striving to improve a relationship with God that life should be perfect, or at least to go smoothly. IF we aren't careful we begin to expect things to go our way. As it's said in the rooms, expectations are resentments under construction. When we feel life should be a certain way and it isn't, we act like spoiled kids, sulking, whining, throwing fits. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly I can go from 42 to 5. and I have seen others regress just as fast.

God wants us to be happy, joyous and free. It's His desire to bless us with a life worth living. Still, there will be times when we won't get our way, or get what we want on the timeline we prefer or in the way we would like to have it happen. There are times we have to practice patience. There are time that we have to learn that what we want is not always what God wants for us, but that what He wants is always better. Sometimes we have to deal with disappointment. Sometimes we have to remember that it's not about us.

I read something recently. "Smooth seas do not make good sailors." I don't know that it's true, because I have never sailed, but I suspect that it's true. I know the idea being expressed is true. Pushing buttons for portraits in a perfectly lit studio that someone else set up doesn't make someone a good photographer, now matter how good the images may look, but dealing with different lighting in different situations on the fly can make a hobbyist into a true artist. And getting everything we want with no lumps or bumps or disappointments is not going to help us learn to live or mature spiritually. Disappointments test our spiritual strength like supernal free-weights. They show how much we have or haven't grown and if we are ready to move to the next level of our walk with God.

I still remember the thrill I had at age five when I finally rode my bicycle the length of the street we lived on without training wheels, without my father holding the seat, and without falling. It seemed the greatest accomplishment in the world. I don't think there would have been any elation or accomplishment had I simply got on the bike and ridden without first struggling with it. I know that I wouldn't have learned the tricks to recovering my balance if I hadn't become unbalanced. That lesson in balance served me well many times in areas far more dangerous than the seat of a bicycle.

We don't always have to be first. It's OK to drive two miles an hour under the speed limit when that's what traffic dictates. We are not entitled to a perfect life, and God, please don't give us in recovery what we deserve. I can never live long enough and do enough good to balance the scales against the destruction I caused while running and gunning. That's why I need God's grace. So where does this idea of I should have things my way come from?

It's pride. A humble spirit is willing to surrender control and let God dictate the how, the when, the way and even the if.  It's easy to believe in God when we've been given the miracle of freedom from the obsession and power over that which we on our own are powerless over. But can we continue to believe in and trust God when things don't look or feel fair?

The secret of the spiritual is that we surrender completely to God. If we submit our wills to God's will and accept His control and plan, knowing that His ways are not our ways and His thoughts not our thoughts, then what happens, whatever that is, doesn't cause us to be angry and resentful.

When we're walking in His will instead of our own, if God doesn't act like a vending machine and instantly respond to our push button dreams and prayers with the thing we want, in the way that we want it, we don't start screaming and shaking the machine. Instead we can continue in faith and truly mean it when we say, "Not my will but Yours be done." When we have learned to do that more than we don't we will have learned to be happy, joyous and free in a way that getting what we want will never provide.