All the Unrelated Pieces

These same little kindergarten grandsons of ours love to play with their toy magnetic tiles.  Scattered around the floor, they don't seem to make sense, just random pieces of every shape and size.  How in the world do they go together?

But even in that mystery, they play vigorously with the pieces, turn them this way and that, attach and detach, connect and cast aside, imagining great designs, even when patterns are not evident.  They rarely look at the structures suggested in the guidebook.  They know there is a lot more in the segments before them than someone else's pragmatic ideas.

 

The more they play with the pieces, the more they see in them, these hard, seemingly unrelated, strange geometric shapes.  And suddenly, great excitement erupts.  A great tower emerges from pieces that don't look like they would amount to much or don't seem to connect.  Like words that rhyme suddenly, like horizons coming into view after a long uphill climb, like the visible breaking through the invisible, like a big Fed Ex package unexpectedly on the doorstep.

And what of both the ordinary and extreme dimensions in our own lives, which lie far beyond our comprehension?  Those impossible things we just don't get, incidents that don't belong, stuff we'd rather ignore.  What in the world can God do with these strange and often broken pieces that don't appear to make sense in our eyes?

That is what the awe of God is all about.  His glory gets all over it.

In God's sight, there are no leftover pieces that do not fit.  We would be amazed not at what God might do, but how God is already redeeming.  We just need to sit with the pieces, pray over them, work with them, give it time, and try to navigate our way through.  God will direct our hearts.  

We need to remember that God never works in singular outcomes.  An odd jagged element that seems like an outlier may only be the vital piece of different experience, perhaps years from now.  And as with our grandsons, sometimes God takes apart to build something in us even more incredible.  He is not limited by our measly vision.  He is the Creator of the universe.

Sometimes all I can verbalize is "How did You do that?"

God builds upon our experiences to take us to deeper understanding of Him, another dimension of which we were not aware. There are no random words or broken pieces in His eyes, no leftovers or unusual shapes that He cannot use.  We try to get ahead of God, but God engineers everything.  Even what I do not understand, even what I may not see in my lifetime, God connects the dots.  He brings the sense to it.  Someday we will no longer wonder but will know and be astonished, "So that's the reason that incident happened when it did, how it did, and why it did.  So that is what it was for."  The wow of someday.  No random designs after all.  Only what we haven't realized yet.

Even the stuff that doesn't work out right now, even the stuff we mess up, God still redeems all the unrelated pieces.

What He builds in us today is only an equipping for tomorrow.  We are all still in kindergarten in our understanding of God's faithfulness.

 

...Who does great things

           beyond searching out,

and marvelous things

           beyond number.

                     Job 9. 10