Making Sense

I spent several days with our fourteen-month-old grandson Adrian last week, developing my relationship with him and getting to know him a little bit better.  He loves sitting on his floor, “reading” books.  Indeed, he opens his thick-paged books and studies the pages as intently as an undergraduate before a final exam.  It is as if he is memorizing each picture, and then he turns the page to study yet another.

“You wonder what is going on in that little mind of his,” our daughter remarked one morning as Adrian was “reading” at the breakfast table.

Adrian recognizes common objects in his storybooks, pointing to the pictures and identifying a few verbally:  ball, book, dog, cat, and flower.  He looks at the pictures. the written words now appearing to him as mere lines across the page, that which doesn’t make sense to him at all. 

He learns gradually by seeing pictures and hearing the rhythms and tones and rhymes of the voice reading to him.  Bit by bit, he will make a connection between the text and the spoken word.  (And as his cousins Maggie and Howie do, he too will eventually correct Gramma when she skips even one little word.)

It is not that those scribbles on the page don’t make sense.  It is just far beyond his toddler capabilities to comprehend at this point.  He hasn’t yet made those vital connections.

Someday he will understand.

And someday,

     so will we.

In Scripture,

I have always understood

   the “sacrifice of thanksgiving”  to mean

praising God even before the outcome is obvious,

    because He is good,

          even when we don’t comprehend

                                                               YET.

Thank God for the things

    you may never understand

    on this side of life.

It is not that God will unravel the mysteries,

taking apart the who,

what,

where,

when,

why,

and how,

but God will reveal

       that they are  seamlessly connected

                                              after all.

He is redeeming them

                                 even now.

This is how one should regard us,

as servants of Christ

and stewards

     of the mysteries of God.

             1 Corinthians 4.1