Meeting with God: Your Will Be Done on Earth as it is in Heaven

Here's a great story I once heard/read from Peter Rollins:

A novice passes through a town on his way to prayer. He meets a couple and they beg him to bring their barrenness before God. The novice asks God to give them a child, but God tells him this is not their destiny.

A few years later, the novice stops by the couple’s house. They introduce him to their three children. They explain that after he left, another devout man stopped by and prayed for them. Shortly thereafter, they conceived their firstborn.

The novice brings his confusion to God, who remembers and laughs.

“That sounds like the work of a saint,” God says, “because they have the power to change destiny.”

When I first heard this story, my Reformed theology alarm went up and I thought, "Change destiny? Are you serious?" But as I thought more and more about this story, and it worked its way through my delicate filters and into my heart, it began to work some changes. I think about this story in the light of "your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," and it reminds me that there is a gap between the way God intends for the world to be and the way the world currently is. That gap is where injustice and emotional scars live, where disobedience meets insecurity, that gap is sin. And, left unchecked, what would the end of the world look like? What would your life look like if nothing changed from here to eternity? I don't know about you, but a destiny where nothing changes is worrisome. Transformation is where I find life and celebration, stagnation is where I find frustration and cynicism. But God changes destiny. God enters into the world, through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and creates a brand new future.

So, as one of my favorite teachers would ask, what is your destiny?