Negotiating With God

As parents, we want to allow our children to have a voice, to feel heard, and to always feel free to express themselves – while being respectful. Our 2 ½ year old has taken this to heart, and lately we have daily negotiation sessions with her. When an option is presented, she has an innocent way of manipulating the situation to end in her favor. For example, we live next to a park in Stillwater, and every morning (around 7am) when she gets up she says, “I think we should go to my park right now.” As to which we reply, “How about in a little bit” and then she says, “How about right now”.  This dialogue can go on for fifteen minutes with her going back and forth, coming up with creative ways to get to her beloved landmark. When we say creative, we mean it. Last week, she offered to rub her daddy’s back if in turn we would go to the park. You can guess where we ended up. Sometimes her negotiating skills work and sometimes they don’t. Either way, during the middle of all of it, we either want to laugh at her attempt, or react in frustration – either response is not productive.

And isn’t this the same approach adults take with God? Could you imagine if God gave us everything we wanted and requested of him? What a disaster that would be. How many of us would have ended up in the wrong place or the wrong job? Or what about if a certain prayer was actually answered – where would you be today? Just like you don’t give a teenager a Corvette for their first car, God grants our desires or gives us the opportunity to reach our goals based upon our maturity, self-control, and dedication. We need to trust that God will never give us more than we can handle, and sometimes it’s amazing just how much, or little, we can actually handle at one time. It’s the same with our children – we only give them as much as they can handle, negotiations aside.