Jeremiah 29:5 & 6

God's Second Best?

Ever wondered if you somehow missed the best God had for your life? Are you drifting in the backwash of what might have been? One thing for certain, you can never go back to yesterday. The question is how do we live today?

Perhaps yours was a specific sin. You felt God calling, "Go North" yet, like Jonah, you said, "No thanks. I'm headed West!" For some, it is that clear. But for others it's a vague suspicion that they have accidentally missed God's will or not have heard Him correctly. Surely, if you were in His perfect will, you wouldn't be surrounded by so much that looks (and feels!) like failure.

I am not sure anyone can answer all the questions that rise from such deep contemplation. And getting stuck in analysis paralysis doesn't help. The only real help I've found is studying the biblical accounts of others who walked in God's "second best."

One of many examples is the story of Israel's exile from the Promise-Land. This was not a situation of accidentally losing their way through blindness or an inability to hear God's voice. These people were rebels. They were prideful. They were presumptuous. They ignored God's repeated warnings and reaped the terrible consequences. If ever a people experienced God's "second best," it was Israel as they sat in Babylon and looked back to what might have been.

Jeremiah-the prophet they had ridiculed and ignored-sent a letter to these exiles giving words he claimed to be directly from God, Himself. They were told not to spend their energy looking back, but to "build houses" and "plant gardens." In other words, they were to get busy and make the most of each day. Rather than looking back at what couldn't be changed, they should look forward to the hope they still possessed.

Many Christians have Jeremiah 29:11 on a plaque, under a refrigerator magnet or underlined in their Bible: "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope." But, did you realize these words were given to a people who were living in the reality of God's second best? These had lost His "first will" for their lives and were living in the "what now?" phase of reality.

Sin has consequences. But what assurance it is to know that God is bigger than even our bad choices! Theologians may debate the details of "perfect will" verses "permissive will" but in the trenches of daily living those terms-although important-are not what we need. We need to focus of the character of our God. With a God who is as faithful as ours and whose love runs so deep it reaches beyond our failures, who's to say that His "second best" is really "second" at all?