Holy threads, consecrated strands, hallowed fibers, blessed filaments

God’s footprints alongside ours, His fingerprints all over our lives: Divine intervention.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? We like having God intimately involved in our lives.

But “…divine intervention is nowhere near as simple a thing as we might imagine,” writes Ravi Zacharias (Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us Through the Events of Our Lives).

Think about this:

Sometimes those footprints are muddy.

Sometimes tattered, holey shoes left those footprints.

Sometimes those fingerprints are sticky, smudged, scarred, bloody.

Divine intervention “cannot be only a journey of unmistakable blessing and a path of ease,” Zacharias continues. “To allow God to be God we must follow him for who he is and what he intends….”

Each of us has heartaches, disappointments, failures.

Many experience betrayal. Unfaithfulness. Abuse.

Some of us know hunger and sickness and handicaps and homelessness.

We know loss, grief, weariness, confusion.

We know hopelessness.

Other times our lives seem hum-drum: We’re boring people living boring lives. We wonder if our lives matter, if we are worth anything of value.

“…incident follows incident helter-skelter leading apparently nowhere,” Frederick Buechner writes, “but then once in a while there is the suggestion of purpose, meaning, direction, the suggestion of plot….” (The Alphabet of Grace)

That’s what Zacharias calls us to see: “the designing hand of God and his intervention in our lives” so that “we know he has a specific purpose for each of us and that he will carry us through until we meet him face-to-face….”

Although sometimes life is blah, other times life knocks the air out of us, if we let Him, and work with Him, God uses all of it to shape us and polish us and mature us and beautify us—though we might not understand it at the time, or even see it.

Zacharias challenges us to imagine our lives as exquisite fabric—vivid, brilliant colors with threads of gold and silver intertwined—and to see God as the “Grand Weaver… with a design in mind for you, a design that will adorn you as he uses your life to fashion you for his purpose, using all the threads within his reach.”

You are important to God. 

You are His workmanship, His treasure. 

Your life is sacred.

God is custom-making the fabric of your life. Look back over the years and search for each thread and color—the dark ones and the pastel ones, the heavy ones and the light ones, the coarse ones and the golden ones. Those are holy threads. Consecrated strands. Hallowed fibers. Blessed filaments.

Search for—make it your quest to—discover the excellent, one-of-a-kind pattern the Grand Weaver is creating out of you.

Go back: look for spools of thread, God-designed, for you alone. Watch and listen for the sound of the shuttle going back and forth in God’s hand. He’s making something beautiful of your life.

The more you grasp

how important you are to God,

and that He’s crafting you

into His masterpiece,

the better you can write

your God-and-you stories—

and the better you can

share them with your children,

grandchildren, great-grandchildren,

and generations yet unborn.