Getting What You Ask For

Have you seen Evan Almighty? You know, the movie where Steve Carell becomes Noah, and builds an Ark because God tells him to? If you haven’t seen it, you should.  Despite the fact that it was panned by the critics, and quite a few bloggers, I really liked it.  There was one scene in particular that really spoke to me.

Lauren Graham is Joan, Evan Baxter’s wife (and mother of their three sons).  She has watched her husband go from insanely ambitious congressman to seemingly raving lunatic, and she is talking to God about it.  She and her children had, earlier in the movie, been praying.  Joan prayed for the family to be closer.

God says to her:

 Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?

 At the time I was watching this scene, I was cleaning up my very messy room.  Hearing Morgan Freeman say this stopped me in my tracks.

If a person asks for patience - does God send them patience? Or opportunities to be patient?

I believe that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. I believe that He knows before I do what I want, what I need, what I am going to ask for, who and what I will become, what contribution I will make in the world, who will love me and who will not and who will break my heart and why.

So I believe that if He wanted to, God could bam make me the most patient person in the world. Or the smartest, or the best mom or wife or friend or housekeeper.

But in my life, God also takes the role of mentor.  He leads me places and lets me see and discover and develop things on my own. How would I appreciate what I have, who I am, if each of the things He has helped me find or discover or uncover or develop wasn’t hard-fought and hard-won and something I could look back on and say yes, I learned that, I survived that, I had faith and believed that it would all be ok in the end and and even if I didn’t fully believe that in the middle of the storm I TRIED to believe it and I WANTED to believe it?

I wouldn’t. I don’t think many of us would.  We are human, and we have to work for something for it to be valuable to us. We have to earn something to believe we deserve it. It’s how we’re wired, or taught, or maybe it’s some sort of genetic memory.

Is that, then,the crux of the paradox I find in Christianity? I didn’t earn Salvation. I didn’t work for Grace. God’s mercy was given freely to all of us, and maybe since we didn’t earn it, we don’t believe we deserve it and we simultaneously take it for granted. I don’t know how to fix that, I don’t know how to make it logical.  It is simply a matter of faith. Some things are given. Some things are earned. Maybe it takes a lifetime to truly learn the difference.

In any case, I learned something from God’s speech - and I think God speaks to us in many ways - I have heard Him whispering in my ear, heard His words come from the mouths of colleagues and friends and people I encountered in seemingly random ways, and I have heard him speak in movies, read his words in books and magazines and blogs and bumper stickers- and it’s not a stretch for me to believe that God was speaking through Morgan Freeman - and what I learned was this.

When I ask for something - patience, knowledge, wisdom, love, understanding, whatever - I need to also ask for the grace, the dignity, the strength, and the awareness to see how it comes to me. I need to value the process as much as the outcome, and I need to be thankful for the situations that test me. It is in the test that I learn how strong I truly am.  God tests me, challenges me, expects more from me, because He loves me. Because He knows how capable I am. 

He made me. He knows me. He loves me.

What more could I ask for than that?

~ by Heather on May 15, 2008.