What Do You Really Want?

I thought I wanted to live in the South. My relatives lived there. I enjoyed and understood the accent. I loved the warm temperatures and the friendly people. College time came, and I applied to a bunch of schools all up and down the East Coast.

God had other plans.

I got accepted to all the ones in the North and none in the South. The closest I could get was just a hair above the Mason-Dixon line, so that’s where I attended.

Go figure that God's plans were better. If I hadn’t stayed in the North, I wouldn’t have met my now hubby. I wouldn’t be blessed with my three wonderful boys, and I wouldn’t be planted in a growing, God-centered church in Massachusetts, where I came to have a real relationship with the Lord.

I’ll never forget my dad’s cousin visiting and telling a story about my grandmother catching him (my dad’s cousin or my first cousin once removed) and his friend smoking cigarettes behind the shed. Instead of yelling and yanking the cigarettes from their mouths, she made him and his buddy finish smoking the whole pack. Fifty years had passed since the incident, but he’d said he still got queasy thinking about it. He’d wanted to look cool smoking cigarettes, but he’d been so sick after smoking a whole pack that he never smoked again.

The Israelites had grown tired of eating manna from heaven every day. They missed the meals they had in Egypt and thought they wanted meat. So God gave them what they wanted, a wind swept so many quail into the area that the birds stacked two cubits deep. The Israelites ate quail for a month until it was coming out of their noses (Numbers 11:19-21). Turned out that, after all their complaining about not having meat, it wasn’t really what they wanted or needed, but God had to prove it to them.

Eve thought she wanted knowledge and to be like God, but God had specifically said not to eat from the tree in the center of the garden. Misled and lured in by the snake, Eve was seduced by something that looked good but was really evil, and she ate from the tree. Adam followed suit, and their eyes were opened, but that knowledge was of good and evil. The world became cursed, and the line of Adam and Eve continued to pay the wages of sin until God sent us a Savior.  

If we continue to want our own way, complaining or begging, then God may give it to us, to teach us a lesson about how what we want isn’t truly what we need. However, God desires to bless us. He wants to give us what is best for us. Jesus said in Matthew 7:9-11, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”  He also states in John 14:14, “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.” David, too, wrote in Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

These scriptures don’t mean that God is a genie in a bottle to deliver our wishes. The key is in delighting ourselves in the Lord. Understanding His purposes and how His will is good, pleasing, and perfect. What we set our hearts on isn’t always best for us, but when we align our will with God’s will, then nothing can stop us, and we’ll be blessed beyond what we could imagine.