Blaming God

(This is from way back in March or April.  I thank my lovely G.I.G. for the awesome time discussing the following!)

Imagine that someone had all the money, resources, and power in the world. Imagine that you had heard that this person was generous with all of his or her things, and had been known to freely give things to those people who needed them. Imagine you were just twenty or so dollars short on cash and needed the money in order to pay your rent for this month (or pay for textbooks, or pay the mortgage, or pay bills, or whatever).

Imagine yourself, then, going up to that well-endowed person and asking for $20.

What would you do if that person didn't give you the answer you were looking for (which, we're assuming, is a yes?)

You have a few options:
-You could keep asking for the money
-You could sigh resignedly and decided "Oh well, he/she really isn't generous after all"
-You could get angry at the person because he/she gives to tons of other people; why not you?
-You could acknowledge that the person may have a reason for not giving you the money and still believe that person to be generous
-You could try to bargain with the person, or try to say that you'll pay him/her back later

Whether it's healing a financial situation, healing a medical situation, healing a relational situation, healing an educational situation, or any other sort of healing, when we turn to God and ask Him to help us, we usually expect to receive that help. What sucks is that sometimes, we don't receive the help we ask for. Sometimes we weren't really expecting Him to help anyways, in which case we're not too disappointed because it just perhaps confirms the notion that He wasn't really generous after all. Sometimes it makes us angry because we needed His help so bad, and it was only a situation that He could fix, and He didn't do it, and this causes us to turn away from Him in a huff and decide, "Well, if that's how you're going to be, then I don't need you. I'll be fine. I'll do it myself." And there's a whole range of other responses we can have towards that.

Many times, basically, we blame God Himself for not giving us what we want. Don't we have good reason to, though? It's His fault that He won't be generous with us like He is with some other people.

There's a couple of different ways one can explore this:

-If you do not know someone, or if you do not know a person very well, and you go up to that person and ask him or her for money, how likely is it that the person will give it to you? How does that person know that you are trustworthy and will pay him or her back, or that you truly need the money that the person is giving you? God truly seeks a relationship with you, and He truly does desire to give you your heart's needs, but you need to show up.

-Sometimes, God has a different plan in mind. Maybe something has to happen in a specific way such that you grow from it, it shapes you, He can use it in a better way, etc. We cannot even begin to comprehend, in our own selfish selves, what plans an omnipotent being could possibly have for us, until those plans start unfolding in our lives little by little.