I Shall Not Want

It has been hard for me not to want. With my husbands unemployment status we don't have enough money in the bank to pay the bills next month. How can I not want even just the money to pay our bills? The birds of the air are well fed, so shall I be? But with no money, how? And, yet I'm not supposed to worry about it? I don't want riches and glory. I only want the basic essentials. I'm not trying to be greedy. I'm just trying to be responsible to feed my family and pay the lenders we owe. So how do I not want that? How? How?

David penned the words himself....I Shall Not Want. (I Shall NOT...) I was begging of the Lord this morning to reveal to me exactly how this works. How can one be in such need and not want?

"After all (David) he had been hounded and harried repeatedly by the forces of his enemy, Saul, as well as those of his own estranged son, Absalom. He was obviously a man who had known intense privation: deep personal poverty, acute hardship, and anguish of spirit. - Therefore, it is absurd to assert on the basis of this statement that the child of God, the sheep in the Shepherd's care, will never experience lack or need." (taken from Phillip Keller)

I have my own personal story that can attest a twist to this a bit. We typically know what we want in life and we go after it. For me the desire was to adopt a third daughter. I wanted a third daughter with all my heart. The Lord opened a few doors and we had the referral of a beaming, beautiful 4 year old Asian child living in California. The day we thought we were booking airline tickets to go meet her and possibly bring her home, things changed. With the Lord's prompting and the family who had her deciding to wait on a decision, we had to walk away from this precious child, that had become the child of my heart. To say that this was painful would be an understatement. We had clothes and bedding for her. We tucked it all away, got on our knees and cried and asked Lord how to move forward. Within 2 days we had the referral of a 2 month old baby girl from Guatemala (that is yes, now our 21 month old daughter toddling around our house.) And when we saw her, yes, we knew that all along she was meant to be our daughter. But there is more. You see God had to take away what we thought we wanted (the precious 4 yr old child) to give us something else....something else we wanted so deeply that we did not even know the desire of our own heart. The Lord himself alone knows the deepest most intimate desires of our hearts and he chooses to bless us with those, even though we ourselves don't know what they are. For me, the Lord took away that precious child I thought I wanted and gave me, not only Lily (which I knew I wanted) but gave me a son. My son, he was the deepest longing desire of my heart and I didn't even know it, but God did.

There are times that the Lord is stripping us of things we cling to with much emotion. The stripping process is extremely painful. But what the Lord intends to give us is the desires of our hearts that we don't even yet know exist. My son is my constant reminder of this.

So the Lord is stripping me of much right now. He may strip me of our financial standings, of our home, of many things, but when it is all done, I will look around me and say "This is what I really wanted. The Lord knew where I needed to be and what I really wanted." So I am working on "I Shall NOT Want" because what I think I want is really, in the end, not really at all what I wanted.



(And, the beautiful, precious child we lost the referral of, is now adopted by some very sweet friends that dreamed of a daughter for many years. God also fulfilled the desire of their hearts. He has a plan and He DOES want to bless us, but sometimes it is not without painful stripping first.)



The Lord IS my Shepherd. I Shall NOT want.
~ Psalm 23 ~