A few years ago, my mom was babysitting my nephew, and he was trying to take her reading glasses from her like he always did at that age. She shook her head at him and said, "You can't have these baby because they'll hurt your eyes."
As my nephew started crying, I remember my mom looked at me and sighed, "I wish he knew that I was doing what's best for him in the long run."
Then, a thought came to my mind. That is really similar to how it often is in our lives when we ask God for something, and He tells us no.
We have all had moments in our lives where we really did not understand what God was doing. We were going through a situation that just seemed outright unfair. You know the typical question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"
I have been guilty of asking this question more than once actually throughout my life. It is so easy for us as humans to only look at our own lives and our own problems and fail to look from God's perspective.
Look from God's perspective. What? That is not a phrase you hear too often, but I think a lot of our questions could be quieted if we chose to try to see the situations in our lives the way God does. The truth is that God has a better view of our lives than we do: He sees what is going to come in the future.
If God sees your future and you can't, what makes you think you know what's best for you more than He does?
If you are asking God for something and He's saying no, He might be protecting you from a situation that would pull you away from Him and make it much easier for you to give into temptation. God wants His Will for your life, and as we know from a previous post, His Will is for you to grow closer to Him and be conformed into the image of His Son. Just as my mom was protecting my nephew's eyes by not letting him wear her reading glasses, God as your Father may just be protecting you.
We see in Psalm 84:11, "For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly." If you are walking uprightly, God is going to withhold no good from you. I love that this verse says that God is a "shield" because what do shields do? They "shield" or protect us from things that can harm us, and that is exactly what our God does for us. He shields us from things that will pull us farther away from Him.
All of this is to say, maybe you find yourself in this situation right now. You want something so much that you can hardly stand it, but regardless of how hard you try, you never end up with it in your grasp. If only you knew that your Father was doing what's best for you in the long run.
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