What To Do When We Don't Get What We Think God Would Want

So when the same concept, issue or Scripture comes up a couple times within a couple days, I try to pay attention. And I often try to post on it--being the external processor that I am, blogging helps me to roll up my sleeves and engage with something...and sometimes it's helpful for others.

In Acts 16, Paul and his buddies are trying to go to Asia to speak the gospel there. Only one problem: God won't let them. The Scriptures twice say that the Spirit of the Lord kept them from doing so, that God would not allow them to do so.

Then Paul gets a dream, a man in Macedonia begging him to come and help them. So they go to Macedonia.

They land in Phillipi, and on the Sabbath they go looking for a place to pray. They bump into Lydia, "a dealer in purple cloth." But there's another little detail that's important: she's not from Phillipi. She's from Thyatira.

Thyatira is in Asia. The exact place Paul was prohibited from speaking the gospel.

Lydia was no small player in her world. She was basically a rich fashion designer. She had a house in Thyatira and in Phillipi. She traveled, she was successful. So instead of a random Jewish guy showing up in Asia to preach the gospel to strangers in a strange culture, the gospel arrives to Asia delivered in a limousine, a woman of power and influence and significant means.

The point is this: sometimes what looks to us like a closed door, sometimes what looks like a "no" from God, sometimes the thing that just doesn't make any sense to us at the time, the thing that we say "if I were God, I would want this to happen"--sometimes those things are going to get done indirectly rather than directly.

Sometimes God calls us to go to Macedonia to get the gospel into Asia. Sometimes God says a short-term "no" in order to say a long-term "yes." Sometimes, rather than the direct route that we think makes the most sense, God calls us to do a "bank shot" to get the job done.

The work of the pilgrim trying to figure all of this out is to wait, trust, submit, and believe. We don't always meet Lydia from Thyatira immediately after our preferred-option door gets closed. Things don't always come together quite so neatly in our lives--there will always be loose ends on this side of heaven.

But sometimes God allows us to see his method behind the madness. And he calls us to walk by faith and believe him, even when it takes us places that surprise, madden or confuse us.