Dependency on God

There's a story that Bill Gates once visited an African village and donated some money to help them build a well, have decent food and clothing, etc. One reporter asked one of the women in the village if she knew he was the wealthiest man in the world. She replied, "He's an American. They're all wealthy." And, in a lot of ways, we are. We turn on the faucet and we have drinkable water. We can easily afford devices to make that water almost perfectly pure. We have the latest medical advances, cars, TVs, and computers so we can read blogs like you're doing right now. Our biggest concerns are often dealing with our difficult bosses or co-workers or handling a little relationship trauma, not trying to avoid starvation, guerrilla warfare, and slavery. We don't pray to God that we'll live another day; we pray that we'll find a parking spot at the grocery store.

In short, because our needs are so much less, our dependence on God is too often less than it should be. And that's the situation I find myself in and just recently realizing I'm in. As you may have guessed if you've been reading this blog, I've had issues with needing a relationship for the longest time. I needed someone to validate me. Now that I'm finally ok with who I am, I don't feel that need, and so don't need a relationship, and so haven't been depending on God for one. I have drifted away from God because I no longer felt the need for anything He could give me.

What I am really saying when I do this is that the relationship, or perhaps better said, the validation from a relationship was what I wanted more than anything, even more than getting to know Him.

It's astonishing how often we treat God like a vending machine. We put in our prayers, a few good works, a little time in the Bible, and then expect that He will grant us our prayers so we can live our lives without Him. Instead of praying God out of our lives, we should pray Him into our lives. We should ask for more dependence on Him, that He work in our lives what He wants and not stress out about it ourselves, that He would become so enmeshed in our lives that going to Him is not a last resort, but a first resort. Even more than that, we should know Him as Father, friend, and king.

I've written about this before, but consider again the Lord's Prayer. "Give us this day our daily bread." It doesn't read, "Give us this day our year's supply of bread," or, "Always provide us our bread every day," it's a prayer of constant dependency on God, day by day by day. It is a constant walk, not God shooting us out of some holy cannon toward a goal or us wandering around aimlessly until we've stumbled into a lion's den and need Him to rescue us, deposit us back on the path, and then leave us again.

And that, I think, is the biggest reason why God so often doesn't grant us the desires of our heart: because our desires would lead us away from Him. They may not be bad things - love, marriage, kids, a promotion, a great job, money - but if they are things that will lead you to depend on God less if He grants them, He will not grant them. Focusing on God is the most important thing for all of us, not just because He wants us to, but because it is what is best for us to do. When our dependence is on God, we can allow Him to work His will in our lives, and not our will. We can trust in Him and not worry about whether things will work out because we know He won't fail us. We don't have to concern ourselves with whether we will be happy at the end because what He has in mind for us is even better than what we have in mind for ourselves...and at the core of that is a better relationship and more dependence on Him.