Throwing Back the Bottle

Want to know what drives me absolutely bonkers?!

Double-asking. I work in an after-school program that kids come to after school (Imagine that) and I am always amazed when I watch a kid ask one counselor to do something, hear the counselor tell them no, and then watch the kid go ask another counselor the same thing. I find myself wondering what's going on in that kid's mind that they think this is going to fly. The obvious answer is that in the moment all the kid wants is their want to be met and if one person isn't meeting it, then maybe someone else will. For some reason, this annoys me to no end.

That was until yesterday, when I realized I am a double-asker. I subscribe to that ideology everyday- that I want my wants meant so if you're not going to meet them, then I will seek out someone who will. The worser (I know that's not a word, but I like it) part being that most often it looks and sounds something like this:

Me: "Dear Jesus, thank you that You are the God of all comforts. Please, extend that comfort to me..."(silently adding, oh and please make sure it's the kind of comfort that I want).

And then even though the Bible states that when we ask, we shall receive and that God is in fact the God of all comforts and that He is always with us and never will forsake us, meaning that the God of all comforts is with me, comforting me. right then in my asking. Closer than my breath, I still turn to people or to things because my want wasn't met the way I want it to be met.

So I double-ask. I ask friends or family or seek comfort in things.

Now, don't get me wrong, I know the Bible says much about sharing our burdens with others and the importance of fellowship, community, and the like, but more than that, it says that our focus should be on God and Him alone.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of chatting with a friend and in the chatting, he brought up an analogy. I am paraphrasing and making the analogy less specific to me, but you'll get it. He said that when we are babies (young,weak, helpless),we look to our parents to feed  us. We can't get what we need without our parents in that moment, but when we're five, we are more idependent. Now, we're masters of forks and spoons and know how to ask for seconds of macaroni and cheese. We grow.

But what if we were five, and we were still being fed the bottle? Not only is that creating a culture of dependency, when the bottle gets taken away, we're gonna be quite upset. For the last five years, someone has been giving us what we need, whenever we needed it and now we're expected to make moves all by ourselves. Whaaaat? We don't recognize that the parents are still in the picture, their role has just changed because they are asking us to do some work. But they are still in the picture- they are still there if we need our hot diggity dog cut into pieces or the corn cut off the cob.

You're probably wondering, what does that have to do with anything else that I have written. I wondered that myself for a second, but it is my assertion that this is exactly what happens when we double-ask God. We ask God for something and He assures us that His promises for us our good and His plans for us are better than we can imagine, but He's requiring that in that we work. We have to use the fork and the spoon to get the food to our mouth. But we want to be bottle fed, so we turn to our friends and we turn to things and we double ask.

The problem with this is that we're turning to people and things and people and things don't last. Eventually, there is going to be a time where people and things aren't an option in a certain situation and if we haven't weened ourselves off the bottle, we're going to be hungry.

This challenges my mind to the tenth power (yes, sometimes I talk in mathmatical terms. Don't judge me). I'm not even sure how to conclude these thoughts because if I am being honest, so often I am looking for the bottle. When I don't know what to do or what steps to take, I want someone to tell me. In their telling me, I am essentially asking them to give me a bottle-which, mind you, boggles my stinkin mind because who wants a bottle, when they can have steak? That's quite the leap...bottle to steak...maybe, I'll try baby food first. On second thought, that steak sounds really good...

And for all of you who read this cause you thought "throwing back the bottle" was referring to a time where I threw back a few bottles.....well, you just been played. :)