Don't Offer Me a Vanilla Frosty

I am a huge fan of Frosties from Wendy’s. I don’t know what they do to get chocolate to have that texture but it is definitely working for them and for many years Dave Thomas and his little red headed daughter have excelled at offering the simple joy of a classic frozen treat with no frills.

As long as I can remember, the Frosty has been a staple of my order with no surprises. That is, until the important corporate Wendy’s people decided that the people wanted options when it came to their Frosties and their decision to add variety consequently lead to one of the most awkward things I have ever accidently said to a stranger.

I was at a Wendy’s late one night ordering my usual Classic Tripple when I decided to finish off the meal with a small Frosty. Everything was fine until the cashier asked if I wanted either chocolate or vanilla.

Vanilla? I did not say I wanted ice cream. I was not asking for a McFlurry or a Dreamsicle, I was at Wendy’s asking for a Frosty. Frosties don’t come in flavors, they are just Frosties! How dare she present me with an option to something other than what I ordered? My perplexities with this newfound option lead me to respond without thinking.

“Chocolate. Of Course. That’s the only way to go.”

Now reading that may not sound too awkward until you realize that it was about 12:30 at night and the cashier happened to be African American and female- all of these facts of which I had completely neglected to take into account when I boldly stated my preference of chocolate over vanilla. Everything is blurry but I think I may have even thrown a wink in which of course made things far more awkward. She looked at me strangely assuming I was cleverly using my fast food order as an attempted pick-up line and I, having realized what I said, mumbled something to myself and ran away. Frosties are cool and smooth, but accidently using them as a pick-up line is not either.

The moral of the story you might ask? Options lead to awkwardness and confusion.

That might be a little bit of a stretch but the truth behind it is fairly accurate. The more options and opportunities we have the greater the chance that we are going to choose something we do not actually want. The more alternatives there are to the perfect will of God the harder it will be to actually do exactly what God wants us to do and yet one our favorite prayers is that God would “open doors.” While God is excellent at opening doors, what I have found in my own life and throughout Scripture is that God generally prefers to slam doors in our face. I am not saying that God gets some kind of sadistic pleasure out of our disappointment, but that often times the only way we can walk in His will is for Him to narrow down our options so that He only has to open the right door.

The whole world is full of options. Watch any TV station for more than five minutes and you will be presented with at least a dozen ways that you could live your life. God is really good at narrowing the playing field. Instead of having to choose which leaders we follow and which philosophy we believe God limited everything down to one Man.

Deuteronomy chapter 2 is all about God giving stuff to other people while His “chosen people” had to keep walking around disappointed. All the children of Israel were casually wandering around in the dessert when they came across a piece of land that they thought would be worthy of their dwelling. They would say “Hey God this would be awesome real estate for establishing your people,” and then God would agree and tell them that it would in fact be awesome real estate but that He had already promised it to somebody else. It would be like Mufasa telling Simba to look past the horizon and see that everything that the light touched belonged to somebody else.

God likes to open up doors of opportunity in our lives just enough to where we can peek through and see inside but not wide enough for us to actually walk through them. That way, after we have finally gone through the right door (the one He had waiting for us all along) we will look back and see how all of our dreams and ideas pale in comparison to what God always had in mind for us. The glimpse of what could have been becomes a memory of how little we expected from God.

The hard part is that when God closes a door it looks exactly like failure or judgment. It looks like we did something wrong. Hanging out in the hallways of life watching doors slam in our face feels like unjust imprisonment. When God whispers “not yet” into our hearts all we usually hear is “I have abandoned you because you are a dirty rotten sinner and nothing you ever door will amount to anything.” When God closes a door, our first thought is that God has intentionally led us into a dead end where we will spend the rest of our lives in cold misery. Nobody likes spiritual claustrophobia.

It is impossible to be a Christian and a pessimist at the same time. Hebrews 11:6 says that anyone who comes to God must believe that He exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek Him. Therefore, if we are actually seeking Him then it is impossible for us to end up in a life-long ditch. Any door God shuts should only make us more excited about what He will one day open. Our prayer should be “God that opportunity was really awesome and seemed to be everything I wanted it to be but for some reason you have closed that door and now it is not even a possibility. I can’t wait to see what you have that is better than that.”

Let God narrow you down and push you into a corner so that the only thing that could happen is the flinging wide of a secret door that leads to pure awesome.