God’s Plan is Enough

Photo by Plush Design Studio on Unsplash

I'll Give Thanks 

by Housefires, feat. Kirby Kaple

So I'll give thanks to God

When I don't have enough

And He knows what I need

When I found out my best friend, who lives in Michigan, was going to be babysitting almost the whole time I was there I questioned God. I think a lot of times as Christians we question before we think. Tempers rise when we don’t get an answer but the answer was there the whole time if we would not have questioned. As I was fuming at God on the lawn mower asking him why He would plan it this way I remembered this song. And the lyrics He knows what I need, floated back to me.

It brought me so little comfort, why did He give me so little time if He knew what I needed? I needed that time to talk to my best friend, God knew how hard our relationship was living so far apart. Why did He not give us more time? I finally stopped waiting for an answer from God. Instead, I just isolated myself and gave a cold shoulder to people who I thought had caused this to happen this way. When we stop listening to God’s answer, we tend to take it out on others. Deep down we don’t want to blame God. We know it’s not His fault. So instead we blame it on other people’s choices. 

The first thing wrong with that course of thinking is that we use it as an excuse to still blame God. Even if we pretend to ourselves to be mad at other people for how their choices effected this, deep down we still blame God for allowing them to make those choices.

I found myself in this situation, but thankfully I recognized it before it hurt others or myself. It was not anyone’s fault. This is how it worked out; it was just chance. But was it just chance? In the moment I said for surest was chance because I did not want to blame others. As I played this song again, I changed my perspective. He knows what I need, He knows what I need, He knows what I need. God is not a God of chance. He has a plan, and most of the time when it seems like chance, we end up taking insult over a small thing or overthinking the choice.

After surrendering the situation to God, accepting that it is no one’s fault, and trusting that God knows best, do we just live with it? God gives us a very clear answer in 1 Thessalonians:

"Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus." 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

God does not tell us to just live with it or say you are okay even if you huff later on about it. That is not full trust or surrender. Instead we are instructed in give thanks, pray, and rejoice. Rejoicing may seem hard to do when you wish something would work out differently. You would be more joyful if it had worked out your way. You want to believe that you would be more happy our way but we are called to rejoice in God’s plan. I think rejoicing can be found in thanksgiving. If we are going to give thanks in all circumstances then that means we are going to be joyful too. I have never been thankful for something and not joyful at the same time. Like it says in the song I’ll give thanks when I don’t have enough. Giving thanks when you feel like you don’t have enough of …(blank), is a huge step of faith. You are saying you trust God and that He knows better than you what is enough. 

The observant person will have noticed that I skipped one of the three commands in the verse: pray continually. I skipped it because it deserves it’s own paragraph. And like I said above, rejoicing and giving thanks are very closely related. Prayer is a little different, because it sums up all the other things listed above. Praying continually is so hard especially when you want things to work your way. We can pray for our way to work out, but it is so much more powerful to pray that God’s plans become your plans. There is always going to be a time when this is super hard to do. When we admit that we will give thanks to God, submit to His plans and trust that He knows what we need, we act upon to the commands of these verses. 

Giving thanks when we don’t have enough is so hard, it is a choice we have to make as Christians. It is ultimately surrendering our wills to God. After fuming on the lawn mower earlier that day, I sat down to do devotions before bed. I turned on the song again and just listened. God knew what I needed, and gave the perfect amount of time. I choose to have faith in that. I could not see it in the moment, we still had weeks before we went to visit my best friend, but I put my faith in it now. When the time did come to visit it turned out better than I could have planned. I got to spend time with her little sister which blessed her and made her feel special, and one of her babysitting jobs got canceled anyway. Declaring that when I don’t have enough, God knows, cares, and give me fulfillment. Not only in the moments leading up to being together but also all the time we got to spend together.