There are many ways to take your question.
For one, depending on what your goal is, for some things we know in advance they are according to God’s will. For example, if I pray for a loving and discerning heart, I don’t have to deal with the question whether it’s God’s will. Because we know He wants us to have those things.
But if it’s a worldly item or accomplishment, I don’t honestly think God usually has too much opinion one way or the other, so long as it isn’t sinful, and for this reason He gave us free will.
Another thing is I would not assume that you are “farther from” your goal than when you started. There may be worldly measures that tell you when you’ve reached your goal, but if it’s the kind of thing you’re praying to God for and thus are hoping some “divine involvement,” then He may take you five steps backwards, 12 sideways, and spin you upside down and back a few times, before you see that He is really taking you by shortcut, to a greater version of the same goal. Also there may be things in motion you can’t see, that will come together quickly.
Like let’s say your goal is to raise a million dollars for charity, in six months. Well, let’s say five months into it you’ve only received $50,000, and you’ve spent $75,000 on the campaign, in a numerical sense you’re further behind than you ever were. It might look bleak, and you may not make the goal, and in fact if you say “I guess I’m worse off than before so I’m not going to make my goal,” then THAT becomes you prayer and the Lord gets working on how to make you worse off before and miss your goal. Words are prayers. What if, out of that $75,000, one of your friends used $30,000 producing and paying for an advertisement to be sent out among people with large amounts of money, and in the last month that commercial starts airing, and all of a sudden you are at double your goal?
Another example is a locked door. Let’s say you need to get into a room for something important, but the door is locked. So you pray to get through the door. You hit the door with sledgehammers, to no avail. Dynomite. So you start holding prayer vigils and lighting candles in the hallway. You plead to the Lord to let you through that door.
Finally you give up, and having resigned from the whole effort, you tell everyone to go home, and then you go to your car to find out the parking valet went home. You walk around the building, looking for your car and notice something strange. You notice in one of the windows, you can see the thing you were trying to get at. You go to the window and see, THAT’S IT! THAT’S THE ROOM! … and (of course you can see this coming) there is an open door 10 feet away from the window.
The key here is not that you have given up on your goal, but that you have given up using your own methods to get there. That’s when God can help you most. When we are fixed in our ways of trying to do something, doing more of it and harder and better may yield greater results. For example, in my story, the goal was NOT to break down the door, the goal was to get to the prize. But we forgot that because we saw the door as an obstacle to getting in the room with the prize.
The fun part is trying to figure out whether any given thing that gets in your way is a obstacle you’re supposed to conquer – like a hurdle you need to learn to clear, or whether it’s a sign you’re barking up the wrong tree. And if it’s a sign you’re barking up the wrong tree, then the question is, are you supposed to go bark up a different tree, or just stop barking? (That kind of alludes back to your original questions.)
One other thing, is that you may be seeing lack of progress toward the goal as far as you can tell, but God is using someone or something else to get you prepared. It’s like that poem “I asked for strength”:
I asked for strength and
God gave me difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for wisdom and
God gave me problems to solve.
I asked for prosperity and
God gave me brawn and brains to work.
I asked for courage and
God gave me dangers to overcome.
I asked for patience and
God placed me in situations where I was forced to wait.
I asked for love and
God gave me troubled people to help.
I asked for favors and
God gave me opportunities.
I received nothing I wanted
I received everything I needed.
My prayers have all been answered."
Author Unknown
I hope this is helpful; your post gave me a whole lot of ideas, but I’ll pause here.
Alan
