Articles
A Jumbled Mess
There once was a boy whose mother enjoyed embroidery quite a bit. He would sit and look up at her as he played and wonder what she was doing. He would ask her from time to time, "Mom, what are you doing?" and she would answer, "I'm embroidering, son." He would tell her that from where he was sitting, "It just looks like a big mess." As he sat at her feet on the floor, all he could see were the different colors, knots of string and frazzled loops. She would look down at him and say, "Son, why don't you go play for a little while and when I'm done for the day, I'll call you back and you can see it from my side."
As time passed, she called him back, "Son, come and take a look at what I've been working on." He would come and sit on her knee, look down, and see that she had embroidered a beautiful sunset with flowers. He could hardly believe how beautiful it was, from that point of view. From his point of view on the floor, all he could see was a jumbled mess that really made no sense to him at all. She simply explained, "Son, now you can see what I'm able to see from my side." What he didn't know, was that there was a pattern on the other side that his mother had been following the whole time.
Often, that is exactly how we feel in our own lives. All we can see is a jumbled mess that doesn't make any sense. When we look throughout scripture, we see that God is always doing things with people that most likely did not make sense to them at the time. When God asks people to walk in obedience to faith, he is asking them to walk in obedience to faith in Him. When God asked Abraham to take Isaac up on the mountain and sacrifice him, Abraham knew that did not make sense because Isaac was the son of the promise. Or when God asked Noah to build the ark in the middle of the desert, that made no sense. It was the act of walking by faith to a promise keeping God which set these and many others apart from everyone else. In Hebrews 11:1, faith is described as "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." We hope for an eternal life that we cannot see, but we have faith in God knowing that He has already provided for us through his Son. All we have to do is walk in faith to the promise that has been made, even when it doesn't make sense.
