Unintended Consequences

If you remember the story of King Midas (maybe from the muffler commercials talking about the "Midas Touch"), you know that he loved gold so much that when Dionysus granted him any wish the king wished that everything he touched would turn into gold.  Sounds pretty good, right?  Sure it does!  Solves a bunch of problems to just be able to turn anything into gold.  The budget...is no longer a problem!

One rather large problem though...what happens when he needs to touch something that he doesn't want turning into gold?  Ummm...oops!  Can you imagine his reaction when he figured that out?  Can't really get your hands around that burger, can you king?  What about making little princes and princesses?  Gonna be pretty tough when you go to hold your bride and she turns into a gold statue.  People are always gonna know where you went too.  They just have to follow the golden footsteps.

That illustrates the law of unintended consequences.  It is the idea that sometimes getting exactly what we want results in unintended, and possibly disastrous circumstances.  I'll bet that pretty much all of us are guilty of praying WAY too narrowly and that, were God not that omnipotent being He is, would quite likely result in unintended consequences if they all got answered.

We pray that God would alleviate our problems when we should really be praying for Him to show us what is to be learned from our circumstances and also to show us how we can use our plights to help others.  We can't do that when we're narrowed so closely on ourselves.

Think about it this way.  If you look through a camera to take a picture of a boy standing in front of the Grand Canyon, you can either focus on the boy or on the Grand Canyon.  You can't focus on both of them at once.  Our focus has to zoom way out which makes it possible for us to see what is going on around us.  The work within us that God does happens when we learn how to interact with the world around us in a way that brings Him honor and glory.

I've talked before about The Courageous Prayer.  If you don't know what that is, it's learning to pray at all times that regardless of our requests that we ask for God's will to be done and not our own.  That isn't easy to pray because it invites seemingly negative circumstances into our lives.  It'd be easier just to pray for health, wealth, and sunshine all of the time!  Praying for God's will is the conscious recognition that we don't, and can't possibly, know it all.  It's recognizing God's control and giving Him 100% of our trust.  God is infinite, and because of that He always knows the endless stream of consequences of any action we take.  Given that truth, how can we for even one second believe we are more capable of deciding what is best for us than He is?  There is purpose in your circumstances, no matter how bad they seem to be.  Allow yourself to see through them and focus squarely on God's will for you in them and you've taken a huge step in your journey to become fully devoted to Christ.