My dear friend Diane Meyer shared the following poem on Facebook. My thanks to author Sarah Trent for writing it, and for permission to repost it. (Sarah’s goal is to call others to “launch out into the deep,” like Jesus told the disciples. You can find her on Facebook and Instagram.)
This is SO very good:
There is no idol more subtle than the life I thought God owed me.
Not the golden calf, not the graven image, not the gods of stone or wood—
but the one I built quietly in my heart.
The version of my life I scripted,
the story I demanded,
the ending I believed I deserved.
It was polished with prayers,
shaped by longing,
wrapped in expectations so carefully disguised as “faith.”
I called it hope,
but sometimes it was entitlement in a holy robe.
I whispered, “Surely, God, You will give me this—
because I love You, because I serve You, because I waited.”
And when He didn’t,
when the script unraveled,
when the chapter didn’t end the way I swore it must, I realized the idol wasn’t out there.
It was in me.
It was the version of life I thought He owed me.
This idol never shouted, never demanded.
It lulled me instead—
with illusions of control,
with dreams that sat enthroned above surrender.
And I, thinking I was bowing in worship,
was actually bargaining with God.
But idols always break us.
They always leave us empty.
And in the crushing of that false expectation,
in the shattering of that image,
something holy rises—
a deeper worship, a truer surrender.
Because when I let go of the life I thought He owed me,
I found the life He always meant for me.
Not lesser. Not cruel. Not careless.
But eternal. Weighty with glory.
Rooted in His wisdom,
not in my demands.
So today I lay it down again—
the idol of “what should have been,”
the altar of “my plans.”
And I whisper through tears and trembling,
“Not my will, Lord,
but Yours.”
Because the life I think He owes me doesn’t exist. The life He gives me—
that is the miracle.
That is the treasure.
That is the cross, the resurrection,
and the promise I can build eternity on.
God calls upon us to trust Him, knowing that He has a plan for us and will work everything in our lives for good. But we delude ourselves when we think we have ultimate control over our lives. It often comes down to this: what we really want is to make our own plans and do our own thing. We don’t want anyone, including God, to impose His plans on us.
It’s all too easy to imagine that God should let us have our way, and give us the life we envisioned. And when He doesn’t, we easily resent Him.
In her devotional Watching for the Morning, Vaneetha Rendall Risner quotes Larry Crabb:
I couldn’t shake the assumption that the display of God’s glory meant the enjoyment of my story. If he loves me, he will bless me. What I did not see was that he wanted to bless me with himself. I was too much like the spoiled child at Christmas who really didn’t much care if dad showed up on Christmas morning as long as he had stacked lots of presents beneath the tree.
Vaneetha adds, “I assumed that if God loved me, He would bless me. It took me a while to see that I could trust God to use the exact hand He dealt me to maximize my joy. Nothing was accidental. And I saw that the greatest gift was not a comfortable life but clinging to Him in a life that was far from comfortable.”
The child whose father steps in front of him to protect him from a hail of bullets can trust him not to poison his food or push him off a cliff. He can trust his father to catch him as he lets go of the monkey bars. And yes, he can trust him even when his father chooses to let him face something dreadful that he could have kept from him.
“He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). When God has given us the greatest gift of eternal life, the one that cost Him everything, shouldn’t we trust Him with every other aspect of our present lives?
