Have you ever started a craft project that was designed to be beautiful? Did you ever plan a home repair to make something function the way it should? When you set out to do those things, did they look perfect from the first step you took in the process? Of course not.
Sometimes life is like that. You go through a difficult or ugly season in your life. Nothing feels or looks the way you think it should. You are disappointed in yourself or in someone you love and trust. When you are in the middle of that circumstance, it's easy to think to yourself - that's just the way it's always going to be, but that kind of thinking is faithless and hopeless.
Though God is a much better artist than any of us could ever be and much better at fixing things, even He takes His time. His projects in our lives are a process, and sometimes that process looks messy. It may be confusing, uncomfortable, and take more time than we think it should, but He knows the end from the beginning and can see the final picture when all we see are the shattered puzzle pieces all around us.
The last seven months have been a trying time in our family. There has been stress and upheaval. Many hours of exhausting work have been done by all of us and we are tired, physically, and mentally. There were times we wondered why we even started on the current "project" in our lives. Wasn't it fine before all this? Why did we rock a perfectly comfortable boat?
No situation in our lives is ever separated from our spiritual selves. We may be going to college, planning a wedding, remodeling a house, starting a new career, or one of a thousand other things that the rest of the world does, but when Christians do those perfectly ordinary things, there are spiritual lessons and spiritual purposes in all of that.
So this week, as we get the keys to our new "multi-generational" home, I can see those final puzzle pieces fitting into their places. I see the favor of God all over the situation, here at the end of the process, when months ago I wondered if our problems would ever resolve.
Philippians 1:6 says, "Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ".
All those things in our lives whether we perceive them as good or bad, are part of that picture. The part you are in right now is not the final picture of your life. It's just the first few strokes of the paintbrush, the first cuts in the lumber of your life, which God is using to create a "whole" that He sees.
