What do you want God to do for you?

I want peace on earth, the boys to be good citizens and participate well in life, a clean and tidy house, a trip to various interesting places in other parts of our world, and yes the perfect church community to belong to. I want people to be kind. I want a good death when I’m old, and I don’t want my car to die before I have enough for the next one or before I die. I want a unit with an extra room so that we can comfortably offer hospitality and has a garden full of flowers and vegetables for six months out of the year and enough time in my day to keep them free of weeds.

I want to be more of a morning person and to be less addicted to the approval of others. I want to allow myself to feel the whole range of human emotion while I act and speak only from the deep wells of love, respect, and integrity. I used to believe that wanting anything for myself was a sin. I used to believe that any desire arising from an awareness of my self was unacceptable to God. But Jesus, in this week’s reading from Mark 10, asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” (v. 51b).

Hearing this invitation, I realised that if I never have the courage to present myself before God, full of needs and wants, then I never give Jesus an opportunity to see who I really am. If I refuse to disclose my wants to God, then my desires, fuelled by secrecy and shame, “metastasize” into resentment. But, when I share, through honest and open prayer, my frivolous or grave or noble or childlike wants with a gentle and loving God, God will use even these to increase my faithfulness, to uncover my hidden wounds, and to affirm my created goodness. Maybe, even, God is doing the wanting in me and through me. Maybe my calling is to discover what the wanting is teaching me about who God is and who I am.

During a clergy support group for those recently ordained many years ago (also known in my time as POTE or colloquially ‘Potty’ training), the mentor (usually the Diocesan Education Officer) suggested role-playing as a discernment tool. One of us was to play the part of God and bounce questions back to the person in the hot seat. Simple enough, but when it came time to ask the question, I was afraid to say the words out loud. I was afraid of getting it wrong somehow.

When doing these sorts of exercise at theological college and during the two  Clinical pastoral Education courses I have participated in, I worried about how much of any grade or assessment would come from this class or group participation. As many will know, I’m an extrovert (both in Myer’s Briggs and general terms), and sometimes I find I don’t really know what I think until I’ve heard myself try saying it out loud. That’s great if I agree with myself! But it’s not so great if I hear the words and have second thoughts about them. In the clergy group, I knew that my colleague, who was a good friend, was not actually God but couldn’t get to grips with what made me so anxious. I think I might have been afraid of getting the real God’s attention. I didn’t want to get it wrong.

Think of standing right in front of Jesus and hearing him ask, “What do you want me to do for you?” Had I done it, I might be healed of all the afflictions of relationship, personal history, and stubbornness that then formed my comfortably, uncomfortable existence. I didn’t dare ask the questions aloud. When I did, years later, God called me to travel the road to my own Jerusalem, to live through challenges for God’s sake that most of us would just as soon avoid. It has meant a lot of uncertainty that challenged my desire to be ordered and in control. Yet, in accepting the place you are in despite all its uncertainties, is a way in which lies healing.

Healing comes when we give up willingly the things we expect and the things we think we love and even the things we don’t like in our lives. Healing can come only when we answer the question. What do you want God to do for you? God is waiting for your answer.