Most people don’t believe in fairy tales.  At least, they’d certainly tell you that they don’t.  But lately I’ve been thinking about how often we do, in fact, have a script planned out for how our life is supposed to turn out.  Some of us get pretty detailed in building our castles in the air.  God’s supposed to get me into This University, where He’s supposed to find me a wife/husband who is blond, cute, and rich, then He’ll get me this job, in this city, paying this much, and then He’ll give us the correct number and gender of children at the correct timing.  We will never fight, our kids will never rebel, we’ll never get seriously ill, we’ll never have money troubles, we’ll always have a great church, and we’ll reach the end of our life looking back and just marveling at how good God was to us.

Sounds ridiculous, huh?  No one would really expect that, would they?  Probably not – at least, not in so many words.  But I’ll bet if we were really honest, we all have far more specific expectations than we might admit to, or even be aware of.  Want to know the quickest way of finding out what we do actually expect?  Have something go the other way!!  When we find ourselves with that “Wait a minute!  That’s not how it was supposed to be!” reaction, it’s a sure bet that we just hit an unrealized expectation. Our script just got edited.

Last Sunday’s sermon happened to tangentially bring up the Matthew passage where Jesus says, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”  In context, He was speaking of material goods, those that may be stolen, eaten by moths or rusted, though in application we broaden the sense to non-material items of value.  But hearing the passage this time, in conjunction with these other ponderings of late, I was struck anew by the reverse implications of the verse:  we can tell what we treasure most by where we have most set our hearts.

We all pray “Thy will be done”, but if we look at our response to life’s events, I think we can gain insight into what we are truly treasuring.  When things are going the way we want them to, of course, it can be difficult to tell if we’re treasuring God’s will being done or treasuring getting to have our way, but when things go off-script, and our dancing sugar plums explode, it becomes very clear where our heart is.  If what we are actually valuing is having our own way, we are in trouble!

When God took away all the blessings He had given Job, Job’s wife told him to just go ahead and curse God and die.  She must have thought that God had to be awfully mad at Job to do all those nasty things to him, and, if He was that mad, He was probably only waiting for one slight provocation more to squash him like a bug.  Job cursing him?   Yeah, that should do the trick!  Get the suffering over with.  If honoring God didn’t get Job the “right” outcome to the story, then forget the honoring God stuff!  Her reaction to God’s actions prove that she saw God as capricious and vengeful, and that she had her heart set on having things her way.  She didn’t understand God at all.  But Job did!  Job said, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.”  I’m sure Job had had his own ideas of what the rest of his life was “supposed” to play out like, visions of his kids and grandkids and his growing financial empire.  Yet Job  acknowledged God’s right to do with and to him whatever He would.  Job didn’t hold any idea that God OWED it to him to continue his future as his past had been.  It wasn’t that Job wasn’t upset, or didn’t ask God about what was going on.  He was, and he did.  However, Job’s reaction to God’s actions prove that he  saw God as infinitely Trustworthy, and that Job had his heart set on God having HIS way, whether or not he, Job, understood it.  He understood God’s freedom to change the script!

When things in our life aren’t going according to script, we have the same choice as Job: to trust “though He slay me”, and be upheld through our trials, or to “curse God and die”, denying ourselves His fellowship and help.  But we’ll only be ready to make Job’s choice if we have first set our hearts to treasure what Job did:  the will of God.   If our heart is set right, last-minute script changes won’t throw us for a loop, because we’ll remember that it’s HIS script, not ours, anyway.

If you must write a script, at least use a pencil, not a Sharpie!  (Just remember, God’s eraser works on BOTH!)