Time for dinner!!!! I announced one evening as our family was settling in after a long day. My two year old son enthusiastically ran to the table, licking his lips until he saw IT on his plate…..BROCCOLI. He closed his eyes tightly, pursed his lips wrinkled his nose, shook his head, and said, “I can’t want it.” I immediately tried to persuade him by stating, “I bet if you try it you will like it.” He looked at me and let me know with certainty…” I can’t want to like it.
The phrase my son coined is a classic and there are members of my family that use it today to communicate our feelings about undesirable events/situations in our lives.
I must admit that I am not one who always is thrilled with the unknown or unfamiliar. Maybe some of you struggle with this as well.
In Psalms 137 we get a glimpse of the difficulty of the situation at hand. The writer must have been one that experienced captivity in Babylon following the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst of it. For there, those that carried us away captive asked of us a song. And those who stole from us requested mirth (amusement, entertainment, laughter), saying “Sing us one of those songs of Zion.” And their response, how can we sing the Lords song in a foreign land?
I can just hear the desperation and the homesickness? I can see myself by the river crying my eyes out, pleading to God. “Lord I did not ask for this, I can’t want this and I can’t want to like it either…I want to go home. You are God and you could easily beam me up and plant me right back at the farm where I belong.”
But God never left the side of his people and kept his promise to allow them to go back to their homeland again. In the meantime the Jewish people did learn to sing in a foreign land just as I have learned to not only adjust but find peace and joy in painful times and in unfamiliar territory.
II Corinthians 9:8 reads:
God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything; you may have abundance for every good deed.
Notice the language….we are not talking about have some grace and limited sufficiency. (All, everything, for always) Now that is a promise I can want…. trusting with confidence that the Lord is always with me, no matter what comes my way.
