What is your stepstool? My two year old daughter, Mamie, has fallen in love with a simple stepstool that we have at our house. There is nothing fancy about this stool. It is your basic, one-step, folding stool, most likely from Wal-Mart. I am pretty sure I bought this thing for Tracy for her birthday a few years ago. She has to use it in the kitchen in order to reach anything over the second shelf. Mamie loves to “help” Tracy in the kitchen. So she gets to see this stepstool being used. In her small mind, she has learned that using the stepstool equals getting things she cannot reach. As parents, we were so proud of her for learning about and exploring new places with her stool. Any parent reading this knows what is about to happen. Mamie’s new-found tool quickly became a problem. The last place a toddler needs to be is in the drawers of a kitchen. Knives, scissors, skewers and more knives. When given the choice between grabbing the wooden spatula or the Viking butcher knife, she always chooses the sharper of the two choices. More than once, I have had to gently pry a knife away from her. The last thing you want to do is startle a kid with a sharp object. Needless to say, the stepstool became a big problem. Tracy and I started to hide it and never made mention of it. This is where the story really begins. After being denied her “stepper,” Mamie began to search the house for this thing. She was like an addict. She would kick, scream, and do all the things toddlers do until she got her “stepper.” No matter where we hid it, she could always sniff it out. We tried our best to explain to her that the stepstool was not a bad thing, but what she did with it could hurt or, even worse, kill her. (Reasoning with a two year old. It’s obvious we are new parents.)

As I am eating dinner one night and watching Mamie play with the stepstool, I start thinking that God has to look at adults like mad toddlers begging for a stupid stepstool.

Luke 18:15-17 Truly, I say to you whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.

It is easy for me to look at Mamie and tell her she cannot have the stool because she will only use it to hurt herself. She is not capable of seeing the damage that could be caused. I have spent some time thinking about this and realized that I’m no different from Mamie. As adults, we often work toward and even pray for things we want and, when God does not grant them to us, we kick and scream like small children. Being good southerners, we hide our fits better than toddlers do. (At least to the public.) We easily justify the things we are begging God for. We could be asking for good things but God knows that, if we get them, we will turn them into God things.

I’ll leave you where I started. What’s your stepstool? The one thing or gift you have been asking God for that he has not granted you yet. No one wants to hear "NO." I certainly don’t like hearing it. Like Mamie, maybe God is holding something back from you because he knows it will destroy you or your family. Like the great theologian, Garth Brooks, says “some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.” Let’s take time this week to thank God for not giving us what we want, but instead giving us what we need.