Oct 20 2024 11 mins 2
You do not know what you are asking. I can’t imagine the feeling of having Jesus Christ himself say that to me. It’s a real conversation stopper. Yet that’s exactly what Jesus said in this morning’s Gospel.
You do not know what you are asking. You have no idea what you are talking about. You do not know what is best for you. You do not understand the bigger picture.
We’ve probably all been in situations where some version of these words is said to us. It’s an awkward place to be in, when what we think we know to be true or ideal, suddenly is full of doubt. When our own side of the story starts to slip away and we feel exposed. These moments are often full of fear and shame.
You do not know what you are asking. Jesus says these words to James and John, the famous sons of thunder. Staying true to their nickname, James and John had boldly approached Jesus with an ask, they wanted to sit at the right and left hand of Jesus in his glory.
Whenever I pray with this passage, I always try to arrive at a place of sympathy for James and John. I always try to get a sense in my own self of when I’ve thought I’ve known was best for me and everyone around me. I remember all the times I’ve gone to God with my bright ideas.
Now it’s perfectly natural to go to God to ask for what we want. We all want certain things to happen and certain things not to happen. We all have our own sense of what would be best for ourselves and the world around us. It’s really hard not to express these thoughts, especially to God.
The problem is that we can easily fall into a trap of thinking that our way is absolutely the best way to do things. We become so certain that our plan is the plan. What we think should happen, well, should happen. We try our best to make it so. We work, we beg, we plead and we strategize ourselves to exhaustion.
Then when things do not go the way we want them to go, it can feel like our life is on pause or on some never-ending detour that will never match up to our original route. It’s hard to be a servant of God when we think this way. No matter what we do, we will keep thinking of what could have been instead of focusing on what God is providing right in front of us. Dare I say that God might have a better plan for us than we realize?
When I was a senior in high school, I had a good friend who had his heart set on going to a certain college. This college was his dream school. It’s all he talked about for months. He talked about the classes he was going to take, the professors who taught there, all the famous alumni, and on and on and on.
You can probably guess where this story is going – one day he got this small envelope in the mail and my friend found out he had been waitlisted by his dream school. He was stuck in the academic version of purgatory. He thought his life was over in the way only an eighteen-year-old can conceive of. He kept talking to me about God, and questioning why would God allow this to happen, and explaining to me why God should have gotten him into this school, and how he had this perfect plan of his life should have gone, and now it was over.
Well my friend never made it off the waitlist, but he did fine. He ended up going to a different school. After a month or so, he never even mentioned his former dream school. His senior year he met a woman in one of his classes, they fell madly in love and got married not long afterward.
Fast forward about fifteen years, I visited my friend and his wife at their home. By this point, they had had four kids, a house, a dog, two cars. As I watched these adorable little kids play around in the front yard, one of them had on a shirt with a college logo on it. I couldn’t help but think of the hours I had spent with this friend as he kept asking God to have his dream school accept him.
I suddenly realized that if my friend had gotten into his dream school, he never would have met his wife, and these four beautiful kids never would have been born. It was a weird spiritual moment and I didn’t say anything to my friend or his wife because I would have to say something like Hey remember all those times you asked God to get into your dream school back in high school?
We do not always know what we are asking. We don’t always know what we are doing either. If God does in fact have a plan for all of us, that means at times our own plans for ourselves will not come true. To be a servant of God, and not go too crazy, requires us at times to sacrifice our own plans and give up ourselves to God’s plan.
We can spend the rest of our lives being bitter or waiting for what we want to happen. We have freedom to do that if we want and plenty of people do. In my experience, they lead miserable lives.
We can spend the rest of our lives telling ourselves that as soon as that one problem in our life is fixed, then we can really start living. To be a servant of God is to know that there are always going to be problems. The circumstances of our life are never going to be perfect. This is it. This is what we get. We are never going to be 100% ready for this.
To be a servant of God is to act within the possible. To be a servant of God is to communicate what you think you know to be true, but also to be ready to be wrong. To have the humility to course correct.
We go through our days doing the best we can under the eyes of God. We rack up our victories with every situation we navigate. At the end of our days, we can look back on our experiences and see God at work.
To live a life devoted to God is a meaning full life, but not an easy life. We are accountable for what we do here. So let’s make the most of it.
