Well, with Christmas just ahead, many children are making out their “wish list”. Kids, however, aren’t the only ones who do this. We all tend to wish for things we want. I remember as a boy I had a desire to be six feet tall. I don’t know why that was so important to me, but since my dad was only 5′-8″ it didn’t look too promising. But I kept wishing and the closer I got to that magic mark the more I checked my height. Finally one day it happened! Guess what– although my dream had come true it didn’t make me any happier. I started another list. This time I wanted to look like Charles Atlas– you gotta be my age to know who he was. A modern day equivalent might be Duane Johnson–aka “The Rock”. Yeah you probably already guessed–that dream didn’t come true.
To this very day I can think of things I wish were different. I wish I was smarter. I wish I had a photographic memory. I wish I could still do a 100 push-ups and bench press 350 pounds. I wish I could sleep all night without waking up. I wish all the aches and pains would go away. I wish my wife was in perfect health, and that all my loved ones never had any problems, etc. I’ll spare you the rest. And, I bet you have a wish list also. For the most part these are harmless desires and we’ll get along just fine without them, but sometimes even these can get out of hand. We can become so obsessed, driven by our dreams, that we make ourselves miserable because they aren’t realized. We feel we just can’t be happy unless it happens. We fail to enjoy what we have (and don’t deserve) because we don’t have what we want. Therefore we are never happy for any length of time because our wish list keeps changing.
It is a sad fact that most people are not satisfied with the way God made them, nor with what He gives them. It is not until we get to the point of being pleased with pleasing God that we are able to overcome this problem. The great thing about this is that while some dreams are out of our reach this can be true of every Christian. To please God all we have to do is to do the best we can with what we’ve got– simply be faithful. We are not in competition with anyone else. We will be judged and rewarded on the basis of our faithfulness to God, not out-doing others. Rather than wishing for things you don’t have just trust God to give you what you need– that will be better than getting what you wanted. If your “wish list” is one of legitimate desires turn it into a prayer list, then if you don’t get what you asked for you don’t need it. God will give you something better. Trust Him. Think about it!
