Connecting the Dots: What God Is Doing When Life Doesn't Make SenseSample

Your Circular Story

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.
The other is to walk ’round the whole world till we come back to the same place. —G. K. Chesterton

I once heard a joke about a guy who walked out his front door and saw a snail on the porch. He picked it up, looked at it, then threw it across the yard. A year later, that same man heard a knock on his door. He opened it but didn’t see anyone. He looked down and saw a snail.

The snail looked up at him and said in a squeaky voice, “What was that all about?”

I've had a few seasons in my life when I felt like a snail that got tossed across the yard.

I'm certain you have too.

You’ve had painful experiences you never saw coming—relational struggles, divorce, illness, financial problems, and all sorts of personal battles. You were doing your best to live right and be faithful, but right in the middle of it, chaos struck and threw you into a season of just trying to survive. It took everything you had just to get back to where you started before the turmoil hit. You might be in the middle of trying to crawl back to where you started from right now. I’m also guessing you have your fair share of questions directed at Heaven.

Why did it have to end that way?
Why did they leave?
Why didn’t God do something?
Why is this happening?

When life gets confusing, we all start asking, “Why?”

After working with lots of people as a counselor and pastor, I’ve concluded that the question, “Why?” isn’t the best one to ask in the middle of your pain. The better question is, How am I going to respond to this?

Why is for later. How is for now.

The answers to why usually only appear when looking backward, from further down the road of life. In the words of Søren Kierkegaard, “Life is lived forward but can only be understood looking backwards.” If you’re asking why in the middle of the pain, it can quickly lead to despair and hopelessness because there’s a good chance there isn’t a good answer right now. The answers will only come later, with the perspective of hindsight.

The Apostle Paul makes a pretty confident proclamation when he says, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28) As followers of Christ, we can be confident that in every season of life -- even if we don't understand exactly what he’s doing – God is working all things for his purposes. Which means God is leading you right now, right in the middle of the confusion.

And God seems to have a very specific pattern to the way He leads us.

In Psalm 23, the psalmist said our Shepherd leads us in “paths of righteousness.” The Hebrew word used for path (magol) has a complex interpretation that means something closer to paths made of circles. Sheep tend to struggle to make it straight up a hill, so a shepherd leads them gently in circular paths—like a spiral—up the hill.

I’m convinced that God’s work in our lives tends to look more like an ever-widening circle than a straight line. It’s pretty common to find ourselves circling back to time frames, places, and experiences and thinking, this again? But each time we come back around, we look different, and God looks different.

In each season of life, there’s a fairly predictable pattern of how he works. I think it looks something like the image below.

Over the next few days, I want to share this pattern with you in hopes that you'll begin to gain some major perspective on what God has been doing in your life. Each stage of the journey serves a specific purpose in the process God uses to sanctify us -- so each stage is important. We'll talk about the first five of those steps in this devotional.

For today, I want to ask you to consider something: What if everything that has happened to you has prepared you for your greatest work ahead? What if all those seasons that seemed “random” were actually God’s hand guiding and preparing you for the work he has ahead for you?

My prayer for you is that as you begin to connect the dots of God's work in your life, you'll get a glimpse of how he has been working behind the scenes for his glory and your good.