Friday, March 23, 2007

Your work has no handles...

A man loses his job at the peak need of his family...a young mother suffers a major health crisis that impairs her ability to care for her little children...a college student fails the crucial test that removes him from the program of study he thought sure was God's will...a fire destroys the home of an elderly couple who could not afford to carry insurance on their paid-for home and they lose it all...an only child of a sweet Christian couple is diagnosed with terminal illness...Everything on this list I have seen...and frankly it doesn't make sense to me. But there is another side too...a man who is a brute of a man to his family, inherits 300,000 dollars and blows it on cocaine, alcohol, and...well you get the picture. It is the old good verses evil...why do the righteous suffer and the wicked do so well.
I want to suggest that we often personally skew the picture. We only chose to see the wicked who are doing well. Many are not.
Perhaps there is another problem with our view of these "tragedies." You see our ability to see and understand these events come only from the side of our limited nature and experience. Our perspective is very small and very blurry. We think life should have certain "handles" to make sense of it. And when those handles are missing we balk and say...it makes no sense. Think about this.
There is a wider, deeper, better, and more invigorating perspective out there that we must gravitate toward. God is at the console of the ship we call life. We are passengers on this ship and his navigation may not make sense to us, but He holds the whole perspective of the journey itself. He knows where He is taking the ship, and He knows how to get it there. And in the process He keeps everyone one board from disaster. The sharp turn of the boat, the bumpy waters, and the windstorm he seems to guide the ship directly into makes no sense to the passengers...but it makes perfect sense to the Captain. He holds the wider, deeper, better, and more invigorating perspective. I take you to the words of Isaiah in 45:9..."Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, 'What are you making?' or 'Your work has no handles.'" Maybe the work really does have handles or maybe it does not need our kind of handles. His perspective always makes sense. We just have to trust it. Think about it.

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