the susie solution

“L’Oreal – because I’m worth it!” “You deserve a break today/So get up and get away/To McDonalds!/We do it all for YOU!” “Pepsi – You deserve it!” Advertisers appeal to their customers’ sense of entitlement for one reason: it works. The instant-credit financing industry is built on the whole idea that you NEED these things, and you need them NOW – and by the droves, people sign up. Walk through any store and you’ll hear a chorus of “But, Mommy, I neeeeeeeeeeed it!” from toddlers who want the tempting toys so deliberately placed right by the check stand, or from teenagers who are convinced they have to have the latest “IT” brand or they’ll die.
When I started writing this post, I wrote out in simple, single-event sentences a timeline of the eighteen months from a fall I took in September of 2013 and going through the start of March this year. I didn’t include anything that was merely the normal wear-and-tear of life, only the out-of-the-ordinary. It took a page and a half! “On December 6, my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer.” “Just after the start of August, I moved into my mom’s to take care of her. “ “Also on the 30th of August, Marie took not one but TWO falls, resulting in five broken bones in her left foot, including one of the most important – and longest-to-heal – bones in that appendage.” “On October 1st, Mama had to go back to the hospital because she was convinced my sister-in-love and I were anti-government agents out to kill her, so she refused to take her medications.” “Just after 2 in the morning on October 29th, Mama finally died, in great pain and distress.” “In the last five months, I have experienced seven deaths in immediate family, near family, or as-good-as-family.” A page and a half – and that’s the truncated version. Yeah, it’s been that kind of a stretch.
The only trips I had taken in those 18 months had been two one-nighters, so the idea of getting away for something longer had real appeal. My son, Phil, who lives across the state, attends a church that holds a mens’ retreat each year around this time; my husband, Rob, has gone to it with him for the last several years. So, Rob and I decided that this year, I would go along and hang out with our daughter, Cherry, Phil’s wife, Brooke, and the two grandprincesses, Evie and Fiona, while the guys were off retreating. No responsibilities, just relaxing and resting and playing – an honest-to-goodness vacation. We would go over March 26th and return home the 1st of April. When a new medical crisis with my cousin Marie on the weekend of the 22nd threatened to jeopardize my being able to go on the trip, more than one person told me, “No – you GO, no matter what! Let others deal with it. You NEED this vacation!!!”
To everyone’s relief, the situation with Marie was resolved enough that we did go to Pullman as planned. However, our going there was about the ONLY thing that went as planned! A nasty tummy bug that went from Evie to Brooke to Nona on succeeding days, a nasty change of weather that flared up my fibromyalgia, and terrible problems sleeping due to side effects of a new med my shrink gave me to help me sleep (how ironic is that?) … nope, I definitely got the wrong script. This was NOT the vacation any of us had in mind. It was a break, yes, away from home and its attendant responsibilities, away from Marie and her issues, but not really a vacation.
So, the question I was left to ponder is this: Did I, in fact, NEED that vacation?
Even just looking at it from a sheer point of logic, of course, the answer would be “no.” While there is no dodging the fact that unrelenting stress can have nasty consequences (such as my sleep disturbances of the last several months), no matter how badly I may have wanted it, no matter how much good it might have done me, a vacation is still only a want, not a need.
On a deeper level, though, wrestling with the issue of our needs and how – or whether – God meets them is crucial to our faith. God has promised that He WILL meet our needs. The very name Jehovah-Jireh, introduced in Genesis 22, means “God will provide”, or “God will see to it.” Writing to the believers at Philippi, in chapter 4 Paul says of Him that “…my God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory.” All through Scripture we see example after example of God’s provision for His people. At the same time, all through Scripture, all through history, and up to the current day there have been and are people of God who have starved to death, who have died of thirst, who have died for lack of shelter, died of or suffered from illness, who have been maimed, enslaved, tortured. Here in the affluent West, few of us face such extreme situations, but even the non-life-threatening ones we do, from the minor, such as the vacation that wasn’t, to the larger concerns such as the job that eludes us or the health problem doctors can’t find a treatment for, can cue a struggle as we seek to reconcile what God says with our perception of His apparent failure to deliver.
There are only two conclusions we can reach: Either God is a liar and does NOT meet our needs, or God meant what He said and our NEEDS are being met. If we believe that God is loving and kind, utterly incapable of cruelty, caprice or mistake, that He has our best and highest interest at heart, and that He is able to make all things work together for Good, then only the latter of those conclusions is possible. Rather than judging God by whether our needs are met, we should judge our needs by whether God has chosen to meet them; if there is something we perceive that we lack that He is not providing for, then it cannot, in fact, be our true need – or, at least, what we need most.
When Martha complained that Mary wasn’t giving her the help she needed to prepare the meal expected of a hostess for a guest, but was instead sitting at Jesus’ feet as if Mary had nothing else to be doing, Jesus’ response in Luke’s gospel (10:41) encapsulates God’s definition of our need: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.” Mary chose to be with Jesus, the one and most basic need we all have. All other things in life are totally eclipsed by our need to be with Jesus.
This vacation didn’t provide the relaxation I envisioned. It did, however, certainly keep me crying out, as I have for the last year and a half, “God, I can’t keep doing this!!!!!” – to which His answer was as it always has been, “You’ve got that right, but just stick with Me, kid. I can do this forever – with or without you.”
Vacations, jobs, health, safety – even life itself – may not be granted us, but the one thing He has absolutely promised us is that He will be with us. We can choose to fret about what we think we need, or we can choose to lay our perceptions of our needs at His feet and by drawing near to Him, have our truest need abundantly met.
We don’t need to get away.  What we need is to get closer.