God Doesn't Always Work in a Way That We Understand, But He Is Always Working

Sometimes we feel very abandoned.  And the age old question that has stumbled people for years has to do with God being good and all powerful and yet allowing evil and suffering.  So when struggles come into our lives, we wonder if God is working at all.  We certainly don’t get it when God allows pain and suffering and injustice to exist in our lives.  We imperfectly set our hearts and minds toward following God and living for Him and His principles and in line with His character.  We wrestle through the world’s view of life, the church’s view of life, the bible’s view of life and our experience, and again imperfectly set to follow Jesus.  And yet here we are still plagued with pain and injustice. 

So sometimes we say that we can’t see that God is working at all.  If God were working, would not my prayers be answered in the way I imagine them to be since they are completely in line with His will for people that is described in the Bible?  I guess that I must have some wrong understanding if this is the case.  Because life certainly doesn't always go according to what I think it should be like. 

The truth is, despite our clarity of vision or lack of it, that God is working.  The picture is so much bigger than what we see.  Again we have to come to a place where we put our lives in God’s hands and trust that He is working.  He always is working even then we don’t see.  He may be working on things we don’t even realize need work.  We can ask why God would allow little children to die…and how can that be God working.  The answer I might dare to give would be that children dying is not necessarily an act of God but the result of a sinful world in general and that, while the death may not be God’s doing, God is working in the midst of it all.  God desires to bring people to know Him and to reach to their hearts.

God works…and sometimes the working is in the waiting on our part.  We grow when we wait; we learn to trust when the answers aren't instantaneous.  This is still God working even though it appears to be inaction on God’s part.  Again, it can go back to the fact that God sees the big picture - the top side of the tapestry - and we don’t.  We may wait because there are other pieces that God is weaving and he will pick up our string again soon.  And we may need a time of remolding or reshaping that cannot come in any other way but suffering.   God promises we will suffer.  This is expected and is refining for us.  It is good. 

I can say that it is the broken times that brought me closer to God.  It is the times when I couldn't figure it out that I ended up finding out that my trust in Him had grown – evidence that God was working when I thought He was not.

Again, trust and sovereignty.