It’s not always good to get what you want; just ask Priscilla Shirer.
“The older I get, the more I look back on things I was begging Him for, and I’m so grateful that He said no,” she said in a recent episode of her podcast. “Because now I can see the way that would have impacted me now if He would have said yes to that then.”
Shirer continued, “One of the gifts age gives you — and I mean that at your stage, like you can look back at something at 10, you can look back at something at 20 — and age, what it gives you is the gift of hindsight. Where you can look back and finally get a little taste for, not everything, but some things, [like] why the no was the best gift He could’ve given you.”
In the caption of an Instagram post sharing the video clip, she wrote, “Sometimes we ask God for what we think we need, but He sees what we can’t. His ‘no’ doesn’t mean He isn’t listening; it means He knows the ending before we ever see the beginning.”
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“Trust the ‘no,’” Shirer continued. “Trust the delay. Trust the closed door. God knows what He’s doing.”
Shirer has previously spoken about trusting in God, even when His plan doesn’t match your own.
“I think that’s so critical for all of us, knowing that we’re going to walk through suffering,” Shirer said in an episode of TBN’s BETTER TOGETHER. “There’s going to be things that come in our lives that we do not prefer. Well, then when things are pretty steady, we better be using that time to cultivate a friendship and a stability with the Lord.”
In a 2015 post on her blog, Shirer explained that faith itself is “an action.”
“By definition, faith is not talking about, thinking about or even celebrating God’s truth,” she wrote. “It is the process of adapting your behavior, your decisions and ultimately, your whole lifestyle so it aligns with what God has asked you to do — without needing to see the evidence it will all work out in the end.”
Shirer added, “My father and pastor, Dr. Tony Evans, puts it like this, ‘Faith is acting like it is so, even when it is not so, so that it might be so, simply because God said so.’”
It’s important to remember that, even when we don’t get the things we ask God for, He is always working His plan for us in ways we can’t even imagine.
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