By Steven Norris
One little word – two little letters – forever changed my relationship with my children: “No!” They had been such little angels. Where did this little defiant 3 year old come from? No matter how much you grow up, there is still, somewhere deep down inside, a little 3 year old who rears his/her head every now and then to say, “No! I don’t want to do that. No! I want it my way.”
We have many names for this small person inside each of us: defiant, stubborn, strong-willed, will-full. It manifests itself in in numerous different ways. When people try to sabotage our plans, it can come out as anger. When we want to coerce things to go our way, it comes out as manipulation. When we always have to win, it comes out as competitiveness.
Into this situation, Jesus teaches us to pray, “Your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” One of the questions that I get asked consistently as a pastor is this: “What is God’s will for my life?” By that, people typically mean, “I would like clarity about my future…I don’t want to make a choice or a mistake…I want to have confidence that God is going to bless my decision.”
There is a story told about a famous ethicist who went to see Mother Theresa. She asked him, “What can I do for you?” The man asked her to pray for him. “What do you want me to pray for?” she responded.
“Pray that I will have clarity.” he said.
“No, I will not do that” she responded. “Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.”
The man commented that Mother Theresa always seemed to have the clarity he longed for — the focus, the single-minded direction. She laughed and said, “I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.”
When we pray, “Your will be done,” we are letting go of that need for clarity and exchanging it for trust in the God who holds our future. As we learn to trust God, we learn to let go of a few other things as well — fantasies, plans, regrets, shame. In Garden of Gethsemene, Jesus himself had to come to terms with his own humanity. Facing the cross, he prayed, “Father is there is any other way…yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).
Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon described the issue this way: “Too often, we are conditioned to think of prayer as asking God for what we want — dear God, give me this, give me that. But now, in praying that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we are attempting to school ourselves to want what God wants.”
To pray for God’s will to be done is to have our imaginations captivated and enthralled with a greater vision. It is to surrender clarity for trust and believing that God — the one who sees the bigger picture — is better equipped to guide my life than I am.