The Most Exquisite Work

"'Did it ever seem strange to you that good people have so much trouble in this world?' said Courtland, voicing his same old doubting thought.

'Well, now why? What's trouble going to be in the resurrection?  We won't mind then what we passed through, and this world isn't forever, thank the Lord!  If it's serving His plan any for me to get more than what seems my share of trouble, why, I'm willing.  Aren't you?  The trouble is we can't see the plan, and so we go fretting because it doesn't fit our ideas.  If it was our plan now we'd patiently bear everything, I suppose, to make it come out right.  We aren't up high enough to get the whole view of the finished plan, so of course lots of things look like mistakes.  But if we trust Him at all, we know they aren't.  And some time, I suppose, we'll see the whole and then we'll understand why it was.  But I never was one to do much fretting because I didn't understand.  I always know what my job is, and that's enough. I'm content to trust the rest to God. It's a God-size job to run the universe, and I know I'm not equal to it.'"

                                         --The Witness, Grace Livingston Hill

From my devotional reading yesterday: a description of how lace is made in Brussels; the spinning room is darkened, except for a light from one very small window, which falls directly upon the lace pattern that is being spun.  The lace is more delicately and beautifully woven when the worker himself is in the dark and only the pattern is in the light. The devotional goes on to say:

"May it not be the same with us in our weaving?  Sometimes it is very dark.  We cannot understand what we are doing.  We do not see the web we are weaving.  We are not able to discover any beauty, any possible good in our experience.  Yet if we are faithful and fail not and faint not, we shall someday know that the most exquisite work of all our life was done in those days when it was so dark. 

"If you are in the deep shadows because of some strange, mysterious providence, do not be afraid.  Simply go on in faith and love, never doubting.  God is watching, and He will bring good and beauty out of all your pain and tears."

                                          --J.R. Miller, as quoted in Streams in the Desert