We get up every morning, and we bravely walk out our front doors and face a world that is unknowable. We can’t predict what will happen. We can’t know if, on a regular day, a reckless car will careen across a barrier and end our world as we know it. We can’t know if, in a classroom on an unassuming day in October, a crazed gunman will begin shooting. We can’t forsee an unthinkable diagnosis. We can’t imagine burying a child. Yet, all of these things unfolded for untold numbers of people during the past week.
And, God, He saw it all coming. More than that, His hand was molding and moving and preventing and allowing and raining down the good and the bad on the righteous and the unrighteous. He has His ways and His purposes, and they are all good, even when things seem bad.
But, God has gifted us with an important limitation. That is, He doesn’t allow us to see into the future. We can’t peer into tomorrow and see how things will go awry or how things will work out. We aren’t tethered to a knowledge of what heartache may await us next week. We don’t have to figure out right this minute exactly how we will live through some devastation that is slated for our future. In His wisdom and mercy, He alone holds knowledge of the future, and He alone figures out how it all works together for good.
Due to our limited understanding of what’s to come, the path we tread as human beings can feel dark. We fret and get anxious and we wish that God would just light our road with our own personal sun, showing every bump and pitfall ahead. God could do that, if He chose to. But, He knows better. He knows that we are fearful people who have trouble trusting His goodness. So, when we become His children, He hands us a flashlight, and He lets us see no farther than the next step. And, in this way, we take one step after the other, while He gifts us with the faith to keep going, even while that dark beyond looms ahead.
It only takes one little step’s amount of faith to follow this good God. Faith as small as a mustard seed. We don’t have to figure out whether our faith is big enough for the next fifty steps. Just the next one.
And, one day when we realize that our next step is heading right up the side of a mountain (and who knows how far into the dark beyond that this climb stretches?), He will give grace enough to keep us moving, one foot in front of the other, for as long as we live and breathe. The future is a mystery. But, His faithfulness is sure.
There is grace in the not knowing. Every morning we can wake up and bless His name, and by nightfall we will know what the day held. Whether it was filled with laughter or tears, bliss or devastation, there He is, holding the light, showing us how to take one more step. So, we move forward, not knowing what is to come, but knowing that whatever it is, He will show us how to walk through it.
Amen <3