When God Doesn't Give You What You Want

House, M.D. (of TV show fame) often played the lines from The Rolling Stones, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you’ll find, you get what you need.” 

From where I sit today, November 14th, 2015 was one of those days where I discovered the truth of those lines in the starkest possible way. I woke up, and my low back was cramping. It was only 6:45 in the morning, so I carefully snuck out of bed, trying not to wake my husband, so I could go to the bathroom to confirm my fear. To get to our bathroom, you had to walk all the way to the very back room of the house, and I felt each step get heavier as I walked in, fumbled with the thick foil wrap, and focused on the instructions again. I set my timer for three minutes and tried not to look, but of course, I did, and thirty seconds in, there was a cross. THE cross. The metaphorical stick turned pink. I was pregnant. 

I somehow walked through a panic attack to the bedroom and started yelling,
“What is this?! What do I do? Help. Help me. NO. NO. HELP.”
“What?” 
“LOOK. WHAT IS THIS?!... Call someone. Call Josh and Shauna. Ask them if we can meet them at the hospital. Is this true?” 

I took another test. I was pregnant. 

I was angry. I didn’t want to have a kid. I was 22. “Why would I want a kid when I’m just now getting to enjoy the pleasures of marriage and not being in school full time?” I thought to myself. In a way, I was angry at God. His sovereign will was for me to have a kid, but that didn’t mean I saw the “magical joy of the miracle of life” growing in my womb. If that sounded cynical, it’s because I was quite cynical about the entire experience. When your body is out of your control and you’re so sick all the time, nothing feels magical. Even up through the first time I held her, it was more of an existential crisis than a Disney-magic Kodak moment. 

During our crash course on parenting, the leader asked us to share our favorite part of pregnancy. Most said, “Feeling the baby kick,” or “Hearing the heartbeat for the first time.” I got weird looks when I answered, “I’ve suddenly become very aware of the things in my life that I need to work through because I don’t want to pass them on to my child.” 

It’s been nearly three years now since I found out I was pregnant with Norah, and while the initial shock and the pregnancy was not something I particularly enjoyed, I am so thankful to the Lord for her. She’s fierce, caring, funny, intelligent, passionate, and so very loved. I did not get what I wanted, but I found I got what I needed. 

What I Didn't Want

God was taking that which I did not want, a pregnancy only a very short year into my marriage, to sanctify me, to make me more like him. When I began to see pregnancy, parenting, and raising a child through that lens of sanctification, my anger began to break apart. This pregnancy, this child, this daughter I now have was his will, and there was nothing I could do to stop it because when God doesn’t give you what you want it is because he is giving you what you need.

I think that when we realize that God doesn’t always give us what we want, but what we need, we can be free to draw near to him in all things. 

When God gives us what we need and not necessarily what we want, that can be a shock to us. We think that God doesn’t truly have our best interests at heart, when the real issue is that God knows our carefully laid plans with our finite view of the universe are not going to lead us down the path of righteousness he has paved. 

Maybe if the Lord would tell us his plans for us, explicitly, we would not face this shock each time our plans get changed, right? I’ve asked time and time again for God to metaphorically drop a piano on my head so I know His will, but his specific will for every detail of our lives is not always written in black in white for us to see - sometimes it is written on the flesh of our hearts. 

How do we live in a world where we don’t always get what we want? Do we stop wanting? If we don’t have control and we never get what we want, then what’s the point of doing anything and sitting around waiting to be a pawn in God’s game?

The Fear of the Lord

We're not pawns, we’re hands and feet. And we can be part of his plan for us to be a light to the world through a humble posture of fear of the Lord. Now, this concept of fearing the Lord always seemed counter-productive to me. A God who wants us to draw near to him also wants us to be afraid of him? That sounds like a toxic relationship and I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life, thanks. 

First off, we’re putting fear in a box (WHAT?! I thought fear put US in a box). Oh, let us lift the lid on that box and explore it for what it really is. 

As a part of speech, “fear” is both a noun and a verb. If you look up fear on dictionary.com, you have to scroll past the classic definitions we’ve come to know so well, “a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc. … the feeling or condition of being afraid,” and, “concern or anxiety; solicitude.” Definition number four is where we’re going: “reverential awe, especially toward God.” 

Even in fear, God is holy. He is set apart from the definitions we have given to fear.

We use the fear of the Lord as a way to scare others, saying, “I’m going to put the fear of God in you,” but what do we show by that? We show that we have the incorrect understanding of fearing the Lord. We tell others that the Lord is to be feared as a hungry lion ready to pounce on his people and kill them when the mood strikes, but the Bible tells us Satan is the lion seeking to devour God’s people (1 Peter 5:8). And while God is certainly like a lion (Revelation 5:5), he is also the lamb who was slain.  

So, if we fear the Lord, we are not hiding from him, but drawing near to him, and by drawing near to him, we get to know him and know his heart and we can see him at work in the world, and we will get better (but never perfect) at seeing where we fit into his work on earth. 

Martin Luther said, “What we, following the Scriptures, call the fear of God is not terror or dread, but an awe that holds God in reverence.” We don’t need pianos dropped on our head, we need fear of the Lord. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and discipline” (Proverbs 1:7, CSB). “For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Proverbs 2:6). 

Frederick Buechner said, “Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.” By holding God in reverence, and drawing near to him, we can know him. We humble ourselves before him, and he shows us how he has created us to be his hands and feet on earth. The Lord sees the world as it is, and he has created us to fill those voids. Take some time to think about what the Lord has given you, what your greatest joy is, and draw near to him. Ask him to reveal to you where your greatest joy and the world’s greatest needs meet. And maybe there you’ll find that you can’t always get what you want, but you might just find you get what you need.