About half-way through my seminary journey, in our last chapel service of the year, we were asked to reflect on what we had been learning throughout the past school year. I remember turning to my fellow classmates and—only sort of jokingly—saying, “I’ve been learning to be careful what I pray for.”

You see, that year had been rough—one of the hardest years of my life. And at least a handful of times throughout the past year I had come home at the end of the day and flopped down on the living room couch much like a sullen teenager. With a little prodding from one of my roommates I often shared—rather incredulously— “I think I prayed for this… I think I freaking PRAYED for this! What was I thinking?!”

I was learning that I serve a God who really does answer prayers, but not in the way that I would have imagined or expected.

I prayed for healing, only to feel the pain grow more intense and unmanageable.

I prayed to know and experience God in a new way, only to have my life and my faith turned completely upside down.

I prayed for insight, only to be given an answer that I didn’t want to hear.

Admittedly, in the midst of it I have often grown frustrated with God. In those moments where I realize that the difficult situation that I’m facing is actually God’s answer to my prayer, I’ve sometimes felt like a child who thought they were being given a gift only to find that it was all some cruel joke. But that is not who God has revealed Himself to be.

Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! – Matthew 7:9-11

In those moments, I have certainly felt like I asked God for a fish and have been handed a snake instead—like God was playing some cruel cosmic joke on me. Yet in hindsight, it has been those very experiences that have, in the end, made me more confident than ever of the GOODNESS of my Heavenly Father. You see, despite the way it has felt at times, God has always been the Giver of good gifts—sometimes I simply haven’t been able to recognize the gift that He’s giving me.

And maybe that’s the case more often than we know. Maybe we’re missing the work that God is doing or wants to do in our lives because it doesn’t look the way that we thought it would. Maybe the discomfort and suffering that we experience is part of the refining process as God is leading us to something more glorious than we could even imagine. Maybe those painful roadblocks that we come across on our journey with God, the one’s that tend to make us think that we got off course somewhere, are actually a part of God’s sovereign—and might I add, GOOD—plan?

The difficulty that we face is this:

We want a spirituality of success and ascent, not a spirituality of failure and descent. – David Benner, Surrender to Love

We set out on our journey with the Lord full of expectation and hope; and those hopes and expectations are not in vain. However, we quickly forget that our call is not to the “good life” that our Western culture sets before us. When Jesus promised us “life to the full” (John 10:10), I’m quite certain it wasn’t the “American Dream” that He had in mind. No, our call as followers of Christ is to take up our cross and follow Him (Mathew 16:24). Jesus offers us LIFE. However, that LIFE is not simply an improvement upon the life that we already live, but a brand new life that must be preceded by a sort of death. That is the counterintuitive message of the Gospel. In predicting his own death, Jesus said:

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds… Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. – John 12:24, 26

Jesus doesn’t simply want to clean up our old run-down house, He wants to tear it down and build something beautiful and new in its place. Sounds great, right? But here’s the deal: that process isn’t always pleasant.

Unless you grew up wrapped in bubble wrap (like most of our parents probably wished we would), you’ve probably fallen off your bike or tripped while playing a game of tag and scraped up your hands and knees. When we came to our parents with our bloody knees, we expected them to make it feel better. But chances are, as they began to clean us up and bandage our wounds we heard the words “this is going to sting a little.” And as the wound was cleaned with an alcohol wipe or bits of gravel were picked out of our skin, we winced, squirmed, and cried out in pain. Maybe in that moment we felt a little betrayed, after all we came for comfort and only got more pain! But whether we realized it at the time or not, this is what our parents had to do—they did not delight in causing us additional pain, but they also loved us too much to let the wound go untreated.

When we ask God to heal the hurting and broken parts of our heart, He doesn’t just want to slap a band-aid on it and give us a pill to take the pain away. That might bring us comfort for a moment, but in the end the wound will only continue to fester and grow. No, He wants to clean the wound thoroughly, cutting away the dead tissue and properly dressing it so that it can truly heal. God is totally and completely committed to our healing and restoration—and as such, He is not committed to our comfort. As C.S. Lewis puts it in The Problem of Pain;

God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.”

So when God answers our prayers in a way that we don’t expect, when the healing that we’ve asked for just plain hurts, may we have eyes to see the GIFT that might be hiding just below the surface. And may we have unwavering faith in the GOODNESS of our God, a faith which looks beyond our circumstances and rests in the loving heart of our Heavenly Father.