Needs and Wants

I am try­ing to fig­ure out how to bridge the gap between what I want and what I need; I am also work­ing on the even big­ger chasm between what I think I need and what God thinks I need. God’s prov­i­den­tial style is patience mixed with per­sis­tence. For all the times I have “waited upon the Lord” he has waited even longer on me. Sooner or later, I cave into the oppor­tu­ni­ties pre­sented by Deity rather than the super­fi­cial alter­na­tives I gen­er­ally prefer.

I want to have an easy life; God wants me to have some char­ac­ter. The two do not always mix. So far, I have had lots of ease mixed with var­i­ous sorts of rel­a­tively mild suf­fer­ing. I am glad that God has stuck to his guns on this one. The easy times have really not been all that reward­ing any­way. Invari­ably, my mis­eries have chis­eled away some of my hard-headed ten­den­cies. God made the almost end­less vari­eties of pain for a rea­son: to teach us what does and does not ulti­mately work and what we really need instead of what we might think we need

Every so often I throw away my expec­ta­tions list and replace it with an accep­tance of God’s pri­or­i­ties list. “Father Knows Best” is more than some cheesy nineteen-fifties tele­vi­sion ser­ial. God made out the agenda. I can either go along with it or I can die whin­ing. What I want, what I think I need, and what is ulti­mately best for me get sorted in life’s cir­cum­stances and then sep­a­rated by spir­i­tual tests. Two out of three even­tu­ally get blown away. My bet­ter self knows to go with the Great instead of the merely good.

For the most part, his­tory is the record of humanity’s inabil­ity to fig­ure this one out. I do not have the time for the major­ity to come to res­o­lu­tion on this one — so I guess I had bet­ter go with the One that will out-wait every shal­low worldly trend and hold out for eter­nal char­ac­ter perfection.