The Game of Life

I have always compared life to a game of chess. I know nothing about chess except that each player is trying to block the planned moves of his opponent...well, that and checkmate, but I don't even know what that means or when to use it! :) So many times I find myself laying out my plan for my life only to have my plan blocked by God, or so I think! When disappointment comes because the path I had envisioned hits a snare, roadblock, detour, or dead end, it's easy to lose hope. In the process of losing hope, the desires are lost, too. The enemy wants me to lose hope and desires because the moment I do, I lose sight of God. John Eldredge sums it up in one sentence, "When we abandon desire, we no longer hear or understand what He is saying." For me, I try to abandon desire because I want to self protect. If I don't desire anything, nothing can be taken from me and I won't be disappointed in God, myself, or others. This isn't the life that God envisioned for me or any of us. God created us to have desires. Ps. 37:4 says, "Delight yourself also in the Lord and He shall give you the desires of your heart." There's more to it than just that verse. When you read the verse before and after, you see God's vision for our desires. Ps 37:3-5 "Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the Lord and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass." I've realized that I need to be vulnerable, admit my desires, ask for God's help in obtaining those desires, and trust Him.

There are a couple of problems with my chess scenario...1) God isn't always responsible for blocking my plan. We are all broken and we live in a broken world. We block our own plan and occasionally we block the plans of others. 2) God doesn't block or detour my plan because He is a mean God who doesn't want me to have the desires of my heart fulfilled. I don't think I really understood why God would want to detour a plan that would allow me to realize a desire until I was reading in Deut. 8 about the children of Israel. "Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert those forty years to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart...He humbled you, causing you to hunger." Deut. 8:2-3

I find it amazing that God led the children of Israel through the wilderness 40 years to find out what was truly in their hearts. They had been so close to The Promised Land, but what kept them from seeing it sooner was a heart problem. It's not that God doesn't want us to have desires, He just wants us to desire Him above everything else.