God on a Stick

I wonder why it is that we always think we know better than God? Maybe you're not that way, but I know I am. There's an old (and odd) saying about "thinking we have God on a stick." I always thought of it as meaning we think we have God stuck on to the end of a stick and we wave Him around like some magic wand. Like we sprinkle a little "God dust" here and a lot of it over there. I never thought of myself as being guilty of that, always someone else. Isn't that always the case, we can so clearly see the faults in others and we are blind to our own? I had a friend who used to say that we treat God like a slot-machine. We expect to put our money (our time, our prayer, our talents, you fill in the blank with whatever fits) in the slot and pull the God handle and we get our prize - sometimes we hit the jackpot and sometimes we don't get anything. I certainly never saw myself as having that attitude. A slot-machine God, please, I would never think that way. Not me!Then there was the teaching that made the rounds for quite some time that we should pray "directed" prayers. We were taught that we needed to pray specifically - in effect, telling God exactly what we needed or what should happen. I have to confess that, being the control freak I am, I bought right into that one. My prayers became more like a grocery list or a honey-do list than anything else. I put a lot of thought into how to pray and what to ask for, never realizing that I was reasoning with my finite mind and leaving absolutely no room for God's sovereignty.You can get by with those distorted views of prayer when life is not giving you anything too tough. However, when the bottom falls out and your life is turned completely upside down, you can wave your God-wand around, put your money in and pull the handle on the God slot-machine and pray all the directed prayers you want, but none of those things are going to get you anywhere except discouraged. Having been through an absolutely hellish time in my life for the last several years, I tried all those things. None of them made even the slightest bit of difference in the cataclysmic events that swirled around without mercy. Not that I could tell, anyway. So I decided that it was all a crock. God must not really care about us. I still believed in His existence and that He could, indeed, perform miracles; you know, heal the sick, set the captives free, make blind eyes see. But I didn't believe anymore that he cared about me personally and I was mad about that. I was mad at Him. I thought I had been sold a bill of goods and I was not happy about that. My vision of God got smaller and smaller until He was ultimately just a tiny dot on the horizon of my life. I was pouting. If He wasn't going to play the game my way - the way I had Him figured out - then I wasn't going to play at all. I pouted for a long time, too. I can be very determined at times. Seven years, but who's counting, right?There were times during that seven years when I would throw out a test line to see how God was going to behave - times when I was either desperate or just thought "well, maybe..." In His mercy and grace, God never gave me what I deserved, which would have been a swift pop in the back of the head. He just kept being God and I just kept being mad at Him. Somehow, I came to believe that if He had just done things my way, the way I prayed, then my family wouldn’t be going through everything that happened. I wanted Him to come around to my way of thinking. We’re talking the height of arrogance here, folks! Still, He didn’t slap me in the back of the head and tell me, “Hey, is your name God?”
That’s the thing about God. He doesn’t react the way we do. He doesn’t think the way we do. He doesn’t see things the way we do. He is God, after all. Somehow, my view of Him had become very pedestrian and ironically, I was mad at Him for being who I THOUGHT He was. Very twisted thinking, I know, but that’s where I was at the time.
Have I mentioned that I can be extremely stubborn? Oh yeah, the seven years thing. That was definitely me being stubborn. All the while that I was being so arrogant and so stubborn, God was quietly working, doing things His way (without any help from me, can you even imagine?) and bringing me and my family through the raging storms intact. Not only intact, but better and stronger. He didn’t do it the way I would have done it, or the way I prayed it would happen, but He did it the way that worked. The God way.
I still don’t understand a lot of the things that happened or why they happened they way they did. It certainly wasn’t the way I would have worked things. But I am trying to remember these things – my name’s not God, His thoughts are higher than my thoughts and His ways aren’t my ways. I’m trying to keep it simple.