In the near future, I hope to publish my book entitled Three Wishes. It explores the tendency of most people, particularly women, to wish for life to be altered in some way. It seems that no matter what phase of life we are in, we have a tendency to wish it away. Is it God’s plan for us to live like this? Can he use these wishes to accomplish his purpose in us?
When we are young, it is easy to look forward and spend high school wishing for college, spend college wishing for marriage, spend our early married life wishing for kids, and then spend our early years of parenthood wishing for the rest that we think we will find when the children are older. Maybe our wishes for the next phases of life are quite different from these, but we all tend to look ahead and wish for whatever comes next.
The older we get, the more likely we are to look back and wish we hadn’t wished away all those earlier phases of life. We wish our teenagers could go back to being toddlers. We wish our marriages could go back to the honeymoon. We wish we could rethink that college degree and go back to choose a different path. Maybe we wish to relive a happy time or maybe we wish to make some of our choices over again and find a new outcome. Oh, how we wish.
Of course, we all have other times in life when we wish we could just stay put. Why do things always have to be changing? We would be happy if only we could keep time from passing. If only we could stay on the mountain where God is good, family and friends are present, and all is right with the world. Why do we have to go back to the valley? How we wish we could live those blessed moments over and over again and truly appreciate them as they are happening.
None of these wishes are going to come true. We can’t rub a lamp or wave a wand and magically change time. Instead, we must realize that our wishes may be standing in the way of the life God has for us. His plan is ongoing. Nothing stops it. Time is part of it. He tells us in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, “For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance. A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and a time to turn away. A time to search and a time to quit searching. A time to keep and a time to throw away. A time to tear and a time to mend. A time to be quiet and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace…yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time.”
No matter what season your life is in today, God is already there. The Bible shows us many women in the Bible who wished just like we do that they could live in the past, understand the future, and hold on to certain moments forever. They sometimes found these wishes to be a driving force behind the actions that God required of them. Sometimes they found that wishing made it hard to move to the next season that God had for them. In Three Wishes, we explore the lives of women like Esther, Lot’s wife, Sarah, Hannah, Mary and Martha, and Mary the mother of Jesus. See how they wished the same things we do and how their lives were affected by it.
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