God’s footprints alongside ours, his fingers 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 alongside ours are muddy.
Sometimes tattered, stinky, holey shoes left those footprints.
Sometimes those fingerprints all over our lives are sticky, smudged, scarred, bloody.
Each of us has heartaches, disappointments, failures.
Too many experience betrayal. Unfaithfulness. Abuse. Bullying. Racial prejudice and profiling.
Some know hunger and sickness and handicaps and homelessness.
We know loss, grief, exhaustion, confusion.
Hopelessness.
Other times our lives seem hum-drum: We’re boring people living boring lives. We wonder if we 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….”
Yes, sometimes life is blah, but other times life knocks the air out of us. If we let him, and if we work with him, God uses all of it to shape and polish us, to mature 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 purposes, using all the threads within his reach.”
You are important to God. You are his workmanship, his treasure. He is custom-making the fabric of your life. Your life is sacred.
While writing your memoir, 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: You.
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.
God can use your stories to teach others
That they, too, are important to Him.
They are his workmanship, his treasure.
He is custom-making the fabric of their lives,
And their lives are sacred.
P. S. I can't get the links to work today. This new computer might be the problem.... Sigh.... Anyway, here are links:
Grand Weaver, by Ravi Zacharias: https://www.amazon.com/Grand-Weaver-Shapes-Through-Events/dp/0310324955/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509044209&sr=8-1&keywords=Grand+Weaver%3A+How+God+Shapes+Us+Through+the+Events+of+Our+Lives
The Alphabet of Grace, by Frederick Buechner: https://www.amazon.com/Alphabet-Grace-Frederick-Buechner/dp/0060611790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1455245629&sr=8-1&keywords=alphabet+of+grace
You are important to God: https://spiritualmemoirs101.blogspot.com/2011/05/you-are-important-to-god.html
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers: https://www.amazon.com/My-Utmost-His-Highest-Paperback/dp/1572937718/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1509047085&sr=8-2&keywords=my+utmost+for+his+highest
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