Wants Needs and Should Haves

I would like to piggyback off of Jennifer’s series on parents and my recent post on “My Way.”  This is just another example of my wants needs and should haves yielding to God’s ways as perfect.

I told Martha the other day, if you are on this planet, then you have parents.  None of us were hatched. And because we are fallen, they will have inevitably sinned against us and we will most certainly be discontent with God’s choice.  This is just the soup we are stirred in.  But I want to mention, without accusation or disrespect, God’s perfect choice of my father.

My father was not an effusive man. I wanted more from him than he could give.  And as a very expressive person, I have fought for and sought after this interaction all my life.  God’s response has been to block all my attempts, a very painful and shaming reality.

This is a lesson that was not accepted easily.  I have struggled with this most of my life, if not all of it. What I wanted in a father was not given to me as I demanded, and so I opposed God on this ground throughout my life. I thought because I wanted it, I needed it and should have had it.  This made me believe I was a victim of God and my father, and so I was justified in my wrong responses.

What I am coming to learn (slowly, I know) is that God’s ways are perfect.  I didn’t have an effusive father because I didn’t NEED a father who was engaging.  All my wants didn’t equal God producing it.  God as my Maker knows me so completely, down to my fulfillment.  My struggle to have something other than His choice and knowledge of me, placed me counter to Him.  We all have a checklist of how we should have been satisfied – and weren’t.  I couldn’t have responded in any other way; I was a sinner resistant to the core.

But now that I am a new creation, I can view it all with new eyes.  His Will is my best friend!  My surrender is connecting to that Will and to Him.

David suffered indifference and disregard from his own father. He was forgotten and left in the field when Samuel came to choose one of Jesse’s sons. But here’s what David said in Psalm 27:10 – “For my father and my mother have forsaken, but the Lord will take me in.”