I have heard this term several times during the training Mike and I finished yesterday.  A deal breaker is something you absolutely can not tolerate.  It means that you cannot care for a child in your home with the trait, behavior, or history that you term deal breaker.  While training we were made aware of all the possibilities when it comes to children we might care for.  Everything from what the home they are coming from might be like, to how they might behave because of it.  We were trained on how to deal with the ramifications that happen for a child when they are in foster care.  Part of training was to discover what your deal breakers were.  For us there are not so many of those, since we were pretty aware of what we were walking into.  For us the deal breaker with some children is the fact that we have stairs, so a child in a wheelchair would not be able to stay with us.  We were given a list of about 150 different traits and possible child history to give a scale of 0-5 on our willingness to deal with that trait.  There are things on that list like bed wetting, stealing, seizures, deformities, and history of abuse.  For some a deal breaker might be a child who is sick, or a child who lies, runs away, or steals.

All of this got me thinking.  We have deal breakers for a lot of things in our life.  We have deal breakers on whether someone is our friend,  where we shop, many of things we choose to spend our time on, and for some people there are deal breakers with God.  Yes, deal breakers with God.  Have you ever thought to yourself “I would do anything for God, except”?  That except is your deal breaker, the something that you wouldn’t do even if God asked you to.  We have to ask ourselves why we have those, and if having deal breakers with God is going to allow us to be in His will.  I have personally found that when I have said “I would do anything for God, except” I ended up having to do that very thing anyway.  Sometimes not by choice, but by circumstance.  I use to say “I would move anywhere for God except a small town or in the desert”, yet I live in a small town in the desert.  Deal breakers with Go simply do not work.

I challenge you to listen to yourself talk about what you would do for God and see if you ever say except, or even think it.  If there is something reconsider that point, for some day you may end up doing that thing you thought was a deal breaker.  If you do end up doing that very thing you thought was a deal breaker and have never considered God’s perspective on that, you could very well end up angry at Him for forcing you into it.  So reconsider whether deal breakers with God are something You want to have.