Talking to my friends lately, and even looking in on my life, there seems to be this common theme flowing. There's lots of trials and troubles and tough things that we are all dealing with going on, and as we are Christians, we know that in these times, we just need to give all our burdens and weights up to God, and let Him guide us. We know that He has all the answers, and so we ask for them. But then we get really frustrated. God doesn't seem to be answering, things are still difficult even after months of prayer, we're so confused and don't know what to do anymore. We're just really lost.
I think that our confusion and frustration and feelings of being lost are not of God, but it comes from a flaw in our thinking. One of our flaws is that what we want is what we think we need. I think we can't always separate what we truly NEED from what we actually just would like to have. We talked a little bit about this in Sunday school this weekend. We looked the passage in Matthew 6 where Jesus is saying do not worry, for God will provide. Three main items are mentioned, food, clothing, and drink. Those are the things that we NEED. But we live in such a world, that we need tons of other things, and the best of it as well. God knows what we really need, and He gives them to us. We need to separate what we really need from what we want, and not get so upset when we discover that everything we want is not necessarily in God's plans. God isn't going to always answer our prayers the way that we want, because what we want is not always necessarily the best.
I think the other flaw is that we expect that when we surrender our burdens to God, that He is automatically at that instance fix everything, and that is usually not the case. God has some interesting timing, timing that is usually not the same as ours. We live in a world where we have to have everything now, everything is so fast paced, lateness causes frustration. God likes to work when He wants to work, and quite frankly, He has the right and the ability to do that since He knows what's best. God's timing is perfect timing, it's never late, it's never last minute. So God may not give you all the answers that you want, or give you clarity right away because maybe it's not the perfect time for that to happen. We must remember that.
God knows what He is doing obviously. If He didn't, we would be in a load of hurt. I think what we need to be doing, instead asking for answers and having the answer that YOU want in your mind, I think we should ask God to open our hearts to what He wants for us. We should ask God to align our hearts with Him, and His ways, and His timing. That would probably alleviate the frustrations that we feel.
Psalm 143:10
