Whose Will Be Done?

How many times have you prayed the Lord’s Prayer?  Many of us have prayed it hundreds of times, even thousands of times.  There are a lot of good things in the Lord’s Prayer, obviously—Jesus would not have given it to us if there were not a lot of good things in it!  But it strikes me that four extremely important words in that prayer are “Thy will be done.”

We may have prayed that thousands of times, but how many of those times have we really meant it?  I mean, it’s something we agree with.  It’s something we nod our heads about when we think about it.  Yes, of course, we want God’s will to be done.  But do we really?  Many times, instead of “Thy will be done”, what we really want is “My will be done.”

We do it without even thinking about it sometimes.  In fact, at times we may be convinced that our will is the same as God’s will.  We convince ourselves that what we want is, in fact, what God wants, and so we convince ourselves that it is going to happen.  We don’t do this with bad intent, necessarily.  We simply believe that what we want is what’s best for everybody, so we cannot imagine why God would not want it, too.

I had an experience along those lines recently.  The details don’t matter, but I was convinced, or more accurately I had convinced myself, that something I wanted to happen was, in fact, going to happen.  Then, I found out that there was a good chance it would not.

I was disappointed, of course.  That’s all right, in and of itself.  We’re allowed to be disappointed when things don’t happen the way we want them to.  But then I realized that my disappointment was really not all that justified.  I had known all along that things might not happen the way I wanted them to.  I just convinced myself that they would simply because I wanted them to so much.  I was thinking about my will, rather than God’s will. 

The fact that things might not happen the way I want them to does not mean they won’t go the way God wants them to.  For one thing, everything that happens is not necessarily God’s will.  God allows things to happen, because God allows us to make choices, but that does not mean we always make the choices God wants us to make.  For another thing, there are other people involved, and they have ways they want things to go, too.  There’s no reason God should consider my desires more important than theirs.

Most importantly, though, it may well be best for me that things don’t go the way I want them to go.  After all, God can see a lot farther down the road than I can.  I can think of several times in my life already where I can see that I am extremely lucky that I did not get what I wanted.  This may be another one of those times.  It’s entirely possible that what God has planned for me is much better than what I had hoped for myself.

Whatever the reason is, it really does not matter.  The point is that I am reminded again to put God’s will ahead of my own.  I am reminded again to pray “Thy will be done” and not “my will be done”.  If we focus on doing God’s will and accepting God’s will, we’ll be a lot better off.  We may not get what we want, but we will get what God wants.  And in the long run, that will be the best for everyone.