Thursday, February 12, 2009

Genie God.

5:46 PM by Christi Bowman

Maybe it was as a kid, in the Sunday school classroom, where I listened to the remarkable stories of the Old Testament told and re-told, by teacher's with agenda's, that I began to perceive that if God is on your side than He gives you what you want. I have been haunted by this idea of God as most of my life, warranted or not, I have not been on the receiving end of "good luck."

I found yours truly accidentally giving sway to this ancient ideology the other day and I had to stop and chuckle as I caught myself. It was on the same day as the bath tub incident. It had been a challenging day as a whole, but with the help of Jesus I had been a fabulous parent. Still, as rest time approached I found myself worse for the wear on the inside and so I desperately counted down the milliseconds until the two year old slept and the older two girls played quietly in their room.

My two and a half year old sleeps with a white noise machine; a sleeping technique I picked up from a child rearing book as I was having my second; and it has worked like a charm. The other day my two year old was playing with the white noise machine he has had since birth and he broke it. I was able to dig up another one, but for some reason the power cord to it has vanished and so we have found ourselves very dependent on double AA batteries as of late.

On this particularly stressful day the batteries had gotten low and although the machine was making white noise it was not coming out with the fullness of sound to which my son's finely tuned ears have become accustom.

Have I mentioned that my two year old has OCD tendencies?

As the distorted sound wafted through the speakers he started screaming at the top of his lungs in a very panicky way: "HELP ME" and "FIX IT." It was right then that I remembered putting two of our last three double AA batteries in another toy the day before, fully intending to buy more, as this particular white noise machine takes four double AA batteries.

My husband works across the street from our house, and for the most part I have found this scenario to be a very convenient way to live...except for in moments like this one. I called him to see if he could run to the gas station at the corner and pick up the treasured double AA batteries we were so desperately in need of, but he would not answer his phone.

This was the very moment in which I caught myself whining in my head:

"C'mon God, I have been good ALL day."

In that moment my expectation of God was quite simple; I wanted to know why, on this particular afternoon, He did not see fit to have my back and use His awesome power to over ride the dying batteries long enough for my son to take a nap. After all, isn't there a verse somewhere that speaks to not giving us more than we can handle?

It was in that instant that I heard the words I have been hearing a lot lately:

"Suffering perfects you."

To be honest, the thought of continuous suffering after I have already chosen to enter into suffering does not appeal to me. I can choose to suffer, but I need to know that there is an end to the suffering; I expect an end, matter of fact I down right demand an end, and if it doesn't happen I have been known to throw an adult sized temper tantrum.

It all goes back to my first post on suffering. I am seeing where Jesus never demanded an end to His suffering, and that is a very big difference between Him and me. I will admit to praying some very powerful prayers in Spirit filled moments when I grasp the absolute need of suffering as Jesus suffered, but when I feel all alone and the immediate future looks bleak it is in those moments that I want to pull out as I stomp my feet and say

"I didn't mean THIS...
You can't possibly want THIS...
You may not have THIS!!!"

It was then that I realized that I was being pushed past my limit, in this moment, for a reason. I was being tested, and the harsh reality that there is nothing that I can't handle because I can do all things through Christ came crashing down on me...because He is my portion and NOT my child's nap time.

I calmly put down my phone and reached for the toy that had the two new double AA batteries in it and I slowly dug them out with the Philips head. After that I slowly opened two more toys with the same screw driver, but they took the triple AAA variety. I went to where we stored the batteries to collect the last double AA battery and clung to the hope that the three new double AA's could, along with the one dying double AA, make the white noise machine perform at the level to which my two year old had become acquainted until the completion of his nap.

This is where God came through for me in an amazing and very unexpected way, just because He loves me. I know He is in the very serious business of raising the dead and healing the sick, but in the midst of all of that he also has the time to strategically place a double AA battery every now and then; and although you are perfectly within your rights to think whatever you would like I know for a fact that there was only one double AA battery in the battery bucket, but when I went to retrieve it there were two.

I praised God all the way to my son's room with the four batteries in my hand. I put them in his sound machine and let him push the button. He smiled as he was quite pleased to hear his cherished white noise at it's regular octave. I kissed him and shut his door quietly; relieved to enter into the peace and quiet of rest time. I stood at the stove waiting for the tea kettle to whistle and wondered what I would do without the luxury of this quiet time that I have become so thoroughly dependent on...but that is a post for another evening.

As I reflected on the sequence of events that had just taken place God revealed something to me: When you come to a place where you realize that Jesus is in the suffering and that those He loves are acquainted with affliction because adversity has meaning and eternal purpose...satan can no longer convince you that God neither loves you nor cares for your plight just because you find yourself in the middle of disaster...it is in the upheaval that you can actually come to realize that He cares for you more than you can possibly imagine, and as a son (or daughter) He is using circumstance to grow you up into who He created you to be.

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