When God Doesn’t Give Us What We Want

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By: Jake Kircher

I had always vowed never to go to Disney World. Something about spending a ton of money to wait in insane lines for a three-minute ride was just never very appealing to me. However, the prospect of experiencing “the happiest place on earth” through the lens of my 6 and 8-year-old wore me down, so we planned the vacation and prepared for an amazing week.

As we head out for the airport the day our trip began, things started going wrong right away. My son started acting weird and his nose started running uncontrollably. We realized pretty quickly he had a fever as well. Was this the start of the flu? Should we just go back home and not even bother going to Florida? We decided to push through, however, it meant changing some of our plans to accommodate my son’s illness, which meant we lost every FastPass reservation we had made.

We decided to go to Animal Kingdom for the first of our two days scheduled to be at Disney, and the very first ride resulted in me running out of the 4D show with my daughter screaming in terror. My son made it through but expressed how much he didn’t like it afterword. The next ride was fine, but the one after that was an epic fail that we will always remember.

We waited in line to go on Dinosaur for almost an hour with our kids whining and complaining about the long wait over and over again. When we finally got up to our turn, my daughter began to act scared and said she didn’t even want to go. We convinced her that it wasn’t fast and that she would be safe, and so we strapped in and started the ride.

Right away, both kids started screaming because of the dark, the weird noises, and the animatronic dinosaurs. My daughter buried her head in my lap and screamed and cried. My son clenched his eyes closed and yelled over and over again, “I don’t like this!! I want to get off!” At the end of the ride, you would have thought that my wife and I had threatened to rip off their limbs during the ride. Both kids were hysterical at the end, with my son unbuckling himself and angrily screaming as he stomped away from the ride, “WE ARE NEVER…COMING BACK HERE…AGAIN!!!” I think we were winning Disney.

After that debacle, we got lunch and managed one more ride before the kids had completely run out of energy. We were gone by 3:00 pm. Two days later, we attempted Magic Kingdom, which was much better from a ride standpoint, however, my kids whined and complained all day because of the long waits and by 11:00 am were asking when they could buy their toy for the day and go home. The kids barely made it to 2:45 pm. So much for all the talk about the character parade or the evening fireworks. We had made plans to also spend one day at Universal Studios at the end of the week and we just didn’t even bother trying to make that trip after the two days at Disney.

Barely anything went right for what was supposed to be an amazing family vacation. Every prayer that we had made prior to leaving – for God to bless the week, keep us healthy, and give us a really restful and fun vacation – had felt like it had hit the ceiling and never made it to God’s ears. Yet the problem with prayers like this is that they are most often based on our own limited perspectives of what we think we need in our lives.

As my wife and I reflected on our failed week, we began to realize pretty quickly that everything going wrong was exactly what we had needed. Working together to adjust our plans, not making the whole week about the money we had “wasted” and just going with the flow of what life was throwing our way was actually incredibly healing to some family of origin wounds and past unhealthy patterns in our marriage. God didn’t answer our prayers, but in fact, gave us something so much better for our family. Thankfully God’s perspective is much bigger than ours and God doesn’t want to just give us what we want but instead gives us things that lead to a healthier and more fulfilled life.

Jake Kircher is the Associate Pastor – Greenwich at Trinity Church.

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