Give me the magic-wand solution

Friday, Jul. 03, 2015

I’m very glad that God acts as a patient father, because yesterday I concluded, to my horror, that I’ve been acting like a whiny teenager around him despite my best efforts to be a responsible adult Christian.

This realization struck when I watched a real teenager in action. Until then I was clueless about how I was acting, although I’m not sure ignorance is any better of a defense than willfulness.

For some time now I’ve been asking God to fix a couple of chronic problems, but he hasn’t responded, at least not in the manner I’d like, which is to say that the problems still exist, so I keep whining about them. 

Looking back, I suspect he might have answered me before yesterday, but as usual his communication is like a whisper in a noisy room, and I haven’t been paying enough attention to hear him. 

Now that I think about it, the first inkling I had of his response was several weeks ago, while I was untangling a skein of yarn for my knitting project. It was so snarled that I had to undo individual knots in the middle as well as at both ends. During this process, it occurred to me that I could apply the same method to other problems: approach them from different angles in addition to the usual starting point.

Lazy as I am, though, I let that revelation fade as soon as the yarn was neatly wound. God, on the other hand, wasn’t willing to dismiss it so easily, and yesterday he tapped me on the shoulder again, this time as I stood in the department store checkout line. Behind me were a mother and a teenager I assumed was her daughter. The girl reached for an item on the impulse-buy rack, and the mother told her no, she already had five such things unopened at home.

Normally, I would have ignored such an everyday occurrence, but yesterday I saw myself in that girl, except it was God who was telling me to make use of what I already have. Like, for example, with this plantar fasciitis that has been hanging around since Thanksgiving. Granted, it no longer hurts so bad that I go home at night and curl up from the pain, but neither does it allow me to go hiking, so I’ve been pleading with God to do what I asked the podiatrist to do: wave his magic wand and make it all better, which he has declined to do. I suspect his message is what any good parent would say: “Follow the doctor’s orders.” (He doesn’t seem impressed that I did in fact buy the recommended shoe insert, and I can imagine him nodding “I told you so” at my confession that the daily stretching recommended by the podiatrist hasn’t been getting done.) 

Having now admitted that I already have the solution to my foot pain, but simply have been negligent in following through so that it goes away forever, I suppose I also should acknowledge that God has, in all likelihood, given me the tools I need to resolve other problems in my life. Perhaps the answers aren’t staring me right in the face; I may have to follow different threads to the solution other than the ones I currently am following, but I expect I can resolve most of them myself with what God has provided. 

Today, then, this is what I ask: for God to grant me the grace to carry out the responsibility he has given me, rather than whine to him for a divine solution.