Because sometimes it looks like a mess

 

Two of our grandsons were coloring the other day.  They did not want coloring books with clear cut images defined for them by heavy dark lines.  They wanted blank sheets on which they could freely imagine.

When they were done, one had carefully drawn an identifiable object.  "Good job," I said.

But the other presented me with this picture.  "Tell me about it," I asked.

And for what appeared as a mess, there was an elaborate story woven into every strand.  Nothing random, even down to the colors and to what initially looked like scribbles.

Sometimes life looks like that.

But always, God calls us to follow Him into His narrative, no matter the erratic lines, no matter the circumstances, right into His designs that we don't often recognize without the story behind it, or the story about it,  or how it all fits together.  Sometimes we just live with the temporal mystery that one day will make all the sense in the world.  We just can't see it yet from where we are standing.

But we can trust Him in it.

The naturalist John Muir explored wilderness areas his entire life more than a hundred years ago.  He not only observed the seamless weaving together of God's creation, he sought out the wonders, and lived fully in the midst of it.  He once said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

There will always be a lot of stuff we don't get, because we have finite vision.  Whether we understand something or not, even if it looks like a mess, sometimes that is what God's faithfulness looks like in His grand narrative, far beyond our lifetimes.  We don't have to grasp it all, but we can follow God into it and trust Him in it, one strand and one squiggly line at a time.  And one day on the other side of life, we will gasp, "So that's why...."

Not just mystery, but the intricate beauty of His designs.

And He is before all things, 

and in Him

all things hold together.

                   Colossians 1. 17