When God Makes a Choice For Our Lives

When I wrote the article on high cost choices and low cost choices, I was simply thinking about choices. We do make lots of choices and they have lots of consequences. But then there are those choices we don't make, God does. God chooses certain things for our lives and some of these are totally out of our control. It may be the death of someone we love. It may be the loss of a job or home that was out of our control. These are not easy for us -- we are human beings who love to be in control and resist continually God's control. When I was a young married woman I had plans for my life and family. I even went so far as to make a plan of when my kids would be born and how far apart each one would be. I felt I could control this (wow -- talk about arrogance)! After our first child was born we waited about 2 years and decided it was time for child number two. I got pregnant close to the planned month. 16 weeks into the pregnancy I had a miscarriage. I remember one night crying and almost shaking my fist at God and asking why. In the silence of my room I clearly heard these words, "it's hard to kick against the goads". I had no idea where that came from and it sounded vaguely like something from Scripture. I looked it up in the book of Acts. Paul in recounting the story of his conversion, said that Jesus said these words to him after asking him, "why are you persecuting me"? That's exactly what I was doing, kicking against the goads. A goad is a cattle prod used by herders to move the cattle in a certain direction that the person wants them to go. They have a sharp spike at the end that doesn't probably feel to great to the cow that is being directed by it if that animal wants to go in a different direction. I was thinking I had a choice in all this but God had other ideas. Instead of submitting to His plan, I was kicking against that sharp pointed stick. I learned a huge lesson (but one I've had to repeat learning over and over again). Sometimes we do make a choice but many times God makes the choice for us. How do we respond? We can submit or we can kick against the goad.