I recently attended the Women of Faith Conference in Portland. It was great and encouraging to sit with 8,500 Christian women and praise God. There was glory given to God through storytelling, testimony and music, but the loudest message for me wasn’t in any of those.
A blank canvas was in the center of the stage and a young man dipped his hand in paint and began to create. He softly ran his hand down one side of the canvas leaving a squiggly line. He scooped more paint and waved his arms as though he was conducting a silent orchestra. The scattered lines he made didn’t make sense. But as he continued, slowly an image began to appear. One area looked like an eye and the undistinguishable squiggly line was now the flow of hair over a shoulder. A face took shape and when the artist left the stage, Jesus stared out at a room full of speechless women.
This was an artist demonstrating our own lives. How often do things happen in our lives that we cannot make sense of? The one squiggly line appears to be worthless. But when we allow God time to work in us, He takes all of our experiences (squiggly lines) and works them together; not so they make sense to us but so that we see Jesus in them.
When you are surrounded with trials, how do you see Jesus? Do you have to wait for an answer before you see Him?
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I kind of hate those squiggly lines. They don’t make sense. They look like my scribbles in a coloring book before I turned 4. I am glad God knows how to redeem them. I think my most casual and ugly lines later turn out to be Jesus lines (like the ones done by the artist at Women of Faith). I just don’t see His face when I’m up-close to my problems.
My wife’s parents are in a retirement center. We are helping them by visiting and doing their finances. They don’t have enough money to pay for everything, so we are jumping through hoops to change the situation. In going through one of those hoops, I got to spend 20 plus minutes on the phone praising our Lord and Savior for all he has done in our lives and in the In-Laws lives. I still don’t like the situation, but I can praise Jesus as I see Him working in all our lives, even when I don’t see it.
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