I took Grandpa's offer to mean that he was willing to buy me as much as I could cart out of the store. I loaded my arms with enough merchandise to enable the owner to close up shop and spend the rest of the year drinking coconut on the beaches of Tahiti.

When he spied my pile of playthings, Grandpa looked as if he were about to burst several major arteries. He managed to sputter these words: "Sammy, I meant what I said. You can have anything you want. But, child, you can't have everything."

We live in an age that assumes that "getting everything" is completely reasonable. Our society has a hard time understanding the importance of setting priorities and acknowledging limits. Too many people build their philosophy of life on the keen insights they derive from beer jingles: "Who says you can't have it all?" So we see people who seem genuinely baffled when they guzzle endless "light" beers and discover that their waislines have expanded to measure only a few centimeters less than the coastline of France.

Even believers sometimes have trouble remembering that overgrasping tends to leave us with a fistful of nothing. Now many Christian celebrities have tried in vain to simultaneously lay hold of high status, widespread popularity, financial opunce, and spiritual vigor? That's too many spheres of influence to juggle in the air at the same time. More often than not, these individuals wind up disappointed and a step below cheese mold on the spiritual development scale.

At one point, King David tried to be a big-shot ruler, a red-hot Romeo, and a man after God's own heart. Almost too late, he came to realize that it's impossible to fit all those "goodies" into the standard backpack that life allots us. He had to eliminate the sexual sins or risk splitting the seams and losing it all.

No, we can't have everything we sometimes think we want---but we can have the most important things if we pray wisely and choose well.