Tailor-made training

"We have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?" (Hebrews 12:9)

Much grief over unanswered prayer would be spared if we meditated more on the metaphors God has created for our understanding Him rather than analyzing our lives by the light of our own fires. The constitution of humanity along a generational structure was a brilliant stroke on God's part, yielding didactic pictures of how He Himself operates in the lives of His own children.

That is to say: The Father's purpose is to train and disciple us. And so He configures human relationships to mirror that enterprise---parents spend about 18 years with diminutive human beings, directing them into experiences aimed at molding their character and making them followers or "disciples" of themselves. (We don't necessarily do it well, but that was the idea.)

Training children entails (among other things) a lot of saying "no" to requests. ("But Daddy, why can't I quit my newspaper delivery job? I don't like it anymore." "Mommy, I'm tired of feeding my fish every day; why can't I just flush it down the toilet?"). Allowing a trainee to undergo suffering has always been part of any training plan. It fosters self-discoveries and perseverance, among other things. And, as the author of Hebrews says of the trainers, "we respected them" for it. As parents they knew us better than other people did, and perhaps better than we ourselves.

I was thinking today that even the degree of physical beauty God bestows on a woman may be tailor-made for her character growth. How many women have been spared from shipwrecking their lives by being spared excessive beauty? (We will never know.) Maybe God foreknew that other women would be strong enough to carry beauty with grace, so he allowed it. Maybe some of the homelier women you see have been entrusted with it because they are stronger, and God knew it would sanctify them and not crush them. How many women are in between---neither beautiful nor ugly---because God wanted to be very careful with souls that lacked grace for either extreme?

That was a strange little digression, but the point is this: Why on earth would we expect to receive everything we ask for from our heavenly Father when we don't from our earthly father? When I think of my track record of request-making, I have to say that if I believed God would answer every prayer, I would be scared to death to pray. If we only knew everything God knew about our situation, we would realize that we are just where He wants us to be to conform us to His holiness.

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