Category: Uncategorized

“Are you satisfied with your care?” This is one of those movie lines that’s made its way into our family’s vocabulary.  It’s from the animated film, Big Hero 6, where Baymax is a healthcare provider robot who won’t leave his human patient, Hiro, until Hiro says he’s satisfied with his care.  In our house, it tends to crop up in our conversations when something disappointing has happened.  We’ve done our best to address the disappointment, but we know there’s a good chance it still lingers.

Beloved, are you dissatisfied with God’s care for you?  

Oh we’ve had ample reasons to be disappointed.  Things have certainly not gone as expected.  Disappointment is a normal and natural response when things don’t go as we’d like. But we have to be careful or disappointment will lead to dissatisfaction, and distrust of God will be the fruit of our dissatisfaction.  We will believe the lie that God doesn’t love us, that He doesn’t care for us, that He isn’t interested in our best.

As a parent, I want to do the best I can to alleviate my children’s disappointments.  To shield them from unpleasantness and sorrow.  I want to give them shiny happy insta-moments.  But I don’t think those moments will prepare them for real life.  I’m afraid giving them everything they want will spoil them.  What can you do with something that’s spoiled other than toss it out?  

I don’t want my kids to find that their faith is worthless. Faith that’s only strong enough for pleasant circumstances is no faith at all.  Faith grows in the soil of unpleasant circumstances, of challenges, of not having.  Because faith is certainty that in spite of all evidence to the contrary, God is who He says He is and will do what He has promised. He will ensure that you have everything that you need.  

The problem for us is that we mistake our wants for our needs.  But God never has that problem.  He knows what lies ahead for us, and He knows precisely what we need both now and in the future.  He knows the prescription that will best deal with what really troubles us.  His treatment is sure to bring about holiness when it has done His work in us.

This is what James is getting at when he writes, “Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing” (James 1:2-4).  Isn’t that the definition of satisfaction?  Today, take heart knowing you can rest in God’s care for you.

I trimmed the lilacs the other day.  I wrote about them last year, when they gave surprise blooms completely out of season.  But today I realized something profoundly obvious that I think is worth sharing anyway – the gardener gets to choose how they would like the garden to be.

That’s it. The gardener gets to choose. The wise gardener is certainly a caretaker, balancing the needs of each plant against the needs of others in the garden. But it’s more than just running interference and trying to meet the needs of each plant as best as they can. The gardener has a plan for the garden, something they’re trying to achieve that pleases them.

Pleasing the Gardener is no small thing. After all, the lilacs didn’t please me, and I dealt with them severely. “Those who are still under the control of their sinful nature can never please God” (Romans 8:8). Left in their natural state, the lilacs are crowding out the plants on either side and they’re keeping the light from the plants below them. For their own health, for the health of the garden as a whole, they can’t be left to just do what they like best. They need taming, training, pruning, although I’ve always imagined that if they could speak, they would say they don’t like it much. But the thing is, the lilacs don’t know what’s best for them and they certainly don’t know what I have in mind for the garden.

I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve found that much of the time I’m a lot more interested in the Gardener adapting His plans to please me than I am in pleasing Him.  I would like things to be the way I like, to do exactly what I like.  I want to be shaped in a certain way.  I’d like to dictate my ideal growing conditions.  But like my lilacs, in my self-focus I’m very likely to crowd out those around me and starve those under me. 

So God prunes me. Faith makes me content under His pruning; it agrees that God is God, that He gets to choose, and that He can be trusted to choose well (Hebrews 11:6). The irony is that the more I choose to allow Him to shape me in the way that pleases Him, the more healthy and fruitful I will be, and the happier I will be. Then I will say with David, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well” (Psalm 139:14).