Letting Go of Fair

“It’s not fair.”

I can’t even begin to count how many times those words have crossed my lips—or the lips of my children. Something in the human condition seems to make us crave this idea of fair. After all, in the story of Cain and Abel, wasn’t Cain motivated, at least in part, by thinking it wasn’t fair of God to accept Abel’s offering and not his? Even Jesus’s disciples weren’t immune to grousing about perceived unfairness. In John 21:20–21, we see Peter asking about the fate of another disciple, and Jesus responds in verse 22 by asking, “What is that to you?” (ESV).

When I was growing up and complained to my mother when my sister was allowed to do something I wasn’t or got something I didn’t, very often Mom would give me a solemn look and ask, “What is that to you, Peter?” I hated it. But now I can see the wisdom of her response. She didn’t engage in the argument I was trying to have. She didn’t fall back on the old, reliable response, “Life’s not fair” (even though it isn’t). Instead, she reminded me that Jesus himself never promised us fair. For the longest time, I thought I’d absorbed that lesson. I got out of the habit of complaining when fair didn’t happen.

Until life got hard.

When my husband and I were crawling into our sixth year of infertility and bracing ourselves for another round of treatment, I was ready for my share of fair, and I raged at God about it. Pregnant women seemed to be everywhere I looked. And it wasn’t fair. Why did they deserve a baby and I didn’t? I listed all my positives to God, reminding him how faithfully I’d been following him, of the number of years I’d believed, and how I tried so hard to be the woman I thought he wanted me to be. Didn’t he owe me this? And some women had babies they didn’t even seem to appreciate, so why would he withhold one from me?

Around this time, my husband and I started re-watching one of our favorite TV shows, Babylon 5. Marcus (my favorite character in the series) said a line that jolted me out of my desperate attempt to shame God into playing fair with me. He said, “Wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them?” God doesn’t work on a quid pro quo basis. And isn’t that the best news you’ve heard in your lifetime? [Tweet “If life were fair, we wouldn’t have Jesus.”]

I’ll admit I still was not completely convinced. (I can be stubborn.) So it isn’t too surprising that I found myself in Romans 9 during my Bible reading that week, and I had to stop when I got to this passage: “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?” (Romans 9:20–21 ESV).

Who am I to answer back to God? That question rang in my head the way my mother’s quiet, “What is that to you?” used to. Something in me finally broke, and I began to loosen my grip on the quest for fair. I opened my heart—slowly at first—to the idea that God knows what he’s doing better than I ever will. And I found the courage to say to him, “Not my will, but yours.”

There was no immediate happily ever after; that moment of surrender wasn’t blessed with a pregnancy. In fact, my husband and I will have been married twenty-one years soon, and I’ve never been pregnant. Not once. We have adopted two amazing boys, but even that wasn’t immediate—we had seven more years of struggling, and conscious surrender was involved. (I sometimes wonder if God wanted me to give him the same number of years of surrender to his will over mine as the number of years I’d spent railing at him for not understanding that I knew what was best for me.)

Through all of these struggles, I’ve finally learned to let go of fair and embrace God’s sovereignty. That doesn’t mean I sit back and fatalistically accept everything that comes my way or that I dismiss hardship and trial as being God’s will. Resting in the sovereignty of God is much, much more than that. It’s accepting that God is actively involved in my life. It’s understanding that we do live in a fallen world and that there are times when God’s will is not done on this earth. And it’s knowing that even in those times, if I get out of the way, God will use the broken pieces of my life to bring glory to his name.

If I consider what I was seeking in my quest for fair, it all boils down to glorifying—and gratifying—myself. Letting go of fair puts my focus on the exact opposite of that and brings me closer to living a life that satisfies the whole reason we all were put on this earth. The Westminster Shorter Catechism sums up that reason beautifully with its first question and answer:

Q: What is the chief end of man?

A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. And we can’t do that if we’re focused on fair.

Elizabeth Maddrey is an author of several contemporary Christian romance novels. She is also a wife, mother of two amazing boys, Awana Commander, and beloved daughter of the King. Though her PhD in Computer Science does little to help her succeed in any of those tasks, she owns her nerddom just the same. She blogs at elizabethmaddrey.com.