Growing up I can remember strangers coming to the church asking for help. It made sense to me, when you didn’t know where to go a church seemed like a good place to meet kind people who would do what they could. My dad tells the story of a person who claimed that he was hitch-hiking back to the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania from Montana…roughly 2,200 miles!  He was clearly in an ornery mood, having asked the other ministers in town for help already and not finding their answers to his liking. He had a story in which he was the innocent victim of some unfortunate circumstances, circumstances that left him stranded here in the west. He just wanted to get home, or so he said. In these circumstances I do not doubt for a second that the person standing in the church office has been a victim of many things, and there is a great desire to help. But in this particular instance my dad ascertained from his conversation that he had already been offered help from every church in town in the form of food and lodging in our community, at which he scoffed. He didn’t need food or lodging, he just wanted to get home.

My dad finally asked him, “So what is it that you are asking me for?” “Do you need a bus ticket to Pennsylvania?”

Swiftly came the reply, “I don’t do buses, I am hitch-hiking back home, and I just need money for food.”

“So let me see if I got this right, you don’t want our food, you don’t want a place to stay, you don’t want a ride on an air conditioned luxurious bus with its own bathroom on board to take you all of the way across the country, you just want cash.”

“Yep, and I am fed up with this system of help that won’t give me what I need.”

Every pastor who ministers in a community that borders the interstate in western America probably has a hundred of these stories. My dad tells another story about a pregnant woman claiming to be walking home to Missouri, having started in Oregon (which would mean she had walked some 500 miles already). Again, this is a considerable distance to walk even for the seasoned walkers among our congregation. I’m thinking it would take John Jack quite a few weekends. To put it into perspective for us, Land’s End to Jonh o’ Groats is 874 miles, both of these individuals were embarking on journeys around 2,000 miles (or so they claimed). When the church offered to pay her bus ticket she replied “I could never put up with all of the noisy children that you find on buses. No thanks.” I think my father responded without thinking and said something like, “so you would rather walk 1500 more miles, with an occasional ride from a complete stranger who could be potentially dangerous, just because there are too many noisy children on a bus.”

As I pondered these two incidents, it came to me that many of us, myself included, are not all that unlike these two wandering travelers. We often come to God with a request for help. We seem to think he owes us something since the unfortunate circumstance that brought us to our knees was not our own doing, or so we seem to think. What is amazing to me is that God in his mercy is always ready to provide a helping hand. The problem is that the help he wants to give us is not always what we are looking for. We want to dictate to God what he should do, how he should do it, and in what time frame it should be done. In fact we have already figured out on our own how to fix our problems, we just need his resources to get the job done. 

But God, in His wisdom, does not think like a politician. Throwing money at a problem is not always the solution. Sometimes we need just enough help to sustain us in the midst of life’s trial and tribulations, and not so much to remove them altogether. Our Father in heaven tells us that he can help us with any difficulty we might encounter. His remedy to our plight is to join us in our struggle, and even to provide his Spirit to guide our decisions, empower our actions, and strengthen our resolve to persevere no matter what comes our way.

You see, God is not so concerned with changing our circumstances as he is with changing our character. That is why His word states, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking in anything” (James 1:2-4). Or again, “You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures (James 4:2b-3).