In a Moment, Everything Changes

Ever had a watershed moment in your life when....suddenly...everything changes?  When you see things differently, all of a sudden, as if you were looking through a foggy windshield, then suddenly someone wiped it clean for you?

I have just had one of those. 

Someone we know (but we don't know him very well) got sick recently.  Very sick.  He is just really, really ill.  This is a person who is well respected, well liked, well known in his field, and he was just at the pinnacle of success in his career / field, and now he's really sick and ... things are just really, really uncertain right now.  Suddenly.

Now, meanwhile, Tom and I have had what is probably the worst year in our marriage.  The year is hopefully about over.  We talk about it now like we are hoping that it's done and we can pick up the pieces from the year and hopefully re-assemble our lives and our marriage.

This man's illness is not really connected with the worst year in our marriage, but somehow I thought about this man, and I thought about this worst year, and when I put the two disjointed subjects together onto the same palette, the one subject made the other subject look differently.   I am not sure how that works.  But it does. 

Let me try to put it another way. 

I have a cousin who is a talented artist, among other things.  He does this type of art called stippling (sp).  When I saw a picture that he had made using this technique, I asked him "is that like pointillism?"  Pointillism is a type of drawing that you study in Art History in college.  It's a term you may know better than stippling.  At any rate, they seem similar to me.  If you put a bunch of pencil dots on a piece of paper, it looks random and not connected.  But if you put enough of them on that piece of paper and in certain patterns, and then look at the picture from a sort of distance, then it looks like...art.  It's beautiful and very effective.  I think one time the cousin posted the picture he had drawn and said there were (and then he identified the number of dots on the page...it was in the thousands.)  Unbelievable.  Really cool stuff.

So the dots on the page seem unconnected, but put 'em together in a certain way and in certain patterns and you come up with something that just makes sense. 

That's what happened with me and these two unconnected situations.  One makes the other one "just make sense." 

There is a song whose lyrics include, "God moves in such mysterious ways, His glorious wonders to perform."  He really does move in mysterious ways.  And I am glad that I am not God, because He really does have a lot of things to keep track of.  I cannot keep track of my cell phone, let alone my life, and so I am glad that there is a mysterious God who has some kind of glorious PDA and keeps all our lives organized on it.  He even puts together unconnected circumstances and makes them effective and powerful in our lives.  He's pretty amazing.  

Now, back to my life and putting some random dots on the pages of my life.  I have a pretty good feeling God will connect the dots for me.