Close Up

I remember as a child being intrigued by CloseUp puzzles.  A magazine that we received usually had them on the back cover and I thought they were quite fun.  They were extremely close views of familiar objects, and sometimes surprisingly hard to guess.  In case you don’t know what I’m referring to, Click Here to open a window with some fun examples.

Sometimes things happen that just cause you to wonder WHY?  It’s hard to see how this particular thing could have any benefit to anyone.  Why does God allow it?  How could THIS possibly fit into some great divine plan?  Sometimes it’s just a life interruption, like locking your keys in the car on your way to an interview, and sometimes, it’s earth-shattering, like a diagnosis of cancer.  You can’t help but cast up the words, “Lord, what is the purpose of THIS?”

For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.      Jeremiah 29:11

Deep down, we know that if there is a Creator who is sufficiently interested in His created beings to guide them and chasten them, that He certainly must have a plan, but it’s hard to remember that promise sometimes.

We forget that we live in a close-up.  We see only a tiny microcosm of this vast universe, and whatever is beyond it.  When we look at things from our perspective, sometimes it’s hard to make sense of it at all.  Our lives are such a minuscule bit of the entire picture that when viewed by themselves, they really don’t make much sense.  We think we need to see the bigger picture, we need to understand, but we don’t have the ability to zoom out.  Though our brains seem marvelous and mysterious to us, God has created us with limited understanding.  Compared to His mind, ours are nothing.  Our brains would probably overload and shut down if we tried to absorb all the knowledge in a university library, let alone all the information that has not even been recorded.  My mind is not big enough to encompass it all.

But God is.  He is able to see all of His creation, from individual hydrogen atoms to faraway galaxies.  He is able to control every electron, every bit of antimatter, as well as see what you are thinking right now, what Adam thought after the Fall, and what people will think and do many years from now.  And He can do all this simultaneously, because time simply doesn’t make any difference to God.  His mind is that big.

Which brings me to my point.  I can only see a close-up.

But God sees the big picture.

Why not just trust Him?