When Should You Seek God's Help?

Before or after things get really ugly?  I think the logical answer is before, don't you?  Unfortunately when do most of us actually do it?  After!

After we have tried to handle things all on our own.  And God being the good parent that he is, will attempt to give us guidance before hand, but is more than willing to step aside and let us screw up on our own if that is the way we need to learn the lessons.

When I was first out of high school I worked for a car dealership reconditioning used cars.  Now I was not raised in a very mechanical family so I didn't have a lot of skills coming into that job.  I remember many times working my tail off for an hour or more on a project.  Then after I was done, one of the mechanics would walk over and ask "Did you ever think of doing it like this?" and he would show me a much simpler way I could have done whatever it was I was working on.

That used to really tick me off but looking back it did teach me an important lesson.  So when I had kids I tried to follow that model.  I would try to tell them the easy or better way to do something.  If they listened to me great.  If not I had fun watching them struggle and do it the hard way.    

Now I can be pretty hard headed so it may not be a surprise that my kids can be that way sometimes also.  So many times the listened but sometimes they did not. 

Where am I going with this?  I've just finished reading Judges 20 and 21.  What a mess.  We have a situation where the Israelites develop a war plan and then only afterwards ask for God's direction.  And while they ultimately get victory, they pay a much bigger price than they probably had to if they had only gone to God first, instead of after the fact.

Great lesson to learn.  Harder lesson to implement.  Let's try to focus on doing it in the correct order this year!