Calamity is a blessing. It’s easy to see that God is raining down His love on us when He gives us what we want. It’s not hard to appreciate the moments when our desires are met directly. However, God being vast as He is, is certainly not limited to this kind of provision in His giving. In fact, that He is willing to give us what we think we absolutely don’t want speaks volumes more about His love than the former.

Granting wishes is simple. Not that it’s easy, but for God to give us every desire we thrust before Him in prayer would be all too easy. If He worked this way, all He’d need is a pad to keep track of our desires and then to snap His fingers every once in a while to manifest the desired blessings. As nice as this sounds, I almost fell asleep typing that. To boil God down to a cosmic ATM is to strip Him of all infinite nature.

Why would I ask for what I don’t want? That’s not quite the point here. God gives us His best. That is also for our best, but we don’t have the ability to see that best most of the time. Whether we see or acknowledge it is inconsequential. The fact remains, it is the best. Really, it is up to us to let Him reveal the blessing to us in due time.

We avoid pain. This is primarily why we don’t see God’s gifts as such. Oftentimes, He opts to value our well being above our comfort, which involves a certain amount of pain. This sounds cruel on the surface, but does it not take more love to give a child what it needs over what it says it wants? As the ultimate Father, God is able to see clearly what we need and through that knowledge, shields us from the blessings that would only hurt us and only grants us that which mature His children.

God can never be an ATM. For God to simply grant our wishes like an ATM or a genie, well He would be just that. Powerful, maybe, but ultimately subservient to a programmer or the holder of the lamp. For God to have simply been in the beginning and created from before time and space, He cannot be anything less than all powerful. Therefore, God must have the ability to grant desires as He sees most beneficial, otherwise He is not even a god.

“‘What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’” — Luke 11:11–13

We cannot box in the God of the universe with our conception of pleasure. We have to accept that blessings, like their Giver, are beyond our comprehension. He is not here to sate our happiness. He is the perfect Father, knowing perfectly well what His children need and want. He does want to grant us every request, but in His omniscience, He knows certain requests will bring us only harm. Children, let’s let Him love on us the only way a perfect God can, perfectly and start to see that calamity is a blessing.