Fuzz

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. – Ecclesiastes 3:11

In a way it’s reassuring. I don’t know all the answers, can’t know all the answers. Even Jesus deferred: It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority (Acts 1:7).

Time and space are related, tied together in the great equation of existence with light and dark, energy and matter. Time is a function of space. When we say “everything is beautiful in its time”, it is the same as saying everything is as it is supposed to be in this material existence. That which is beautiful is that which is right. The only things that are ugly are those things that have been twisted away from God’s purposes, and sometimes even those are hard for us to judge.

Fortunately, God has given us a plumb line by which we can ascertain true beauty. He has put the absolute rightness of eternity in our hearts, accessible by us should we seek it. Of course we are the descendents of those who ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and, as such, we are prone to follow our own judgment and chose a standard of measure independent of the straightedge of eternity. Even if we are wise enough to not judge by our own standards, the world system disorients us. There is nothing perfectly straight by which we may measure goodness and beauty. We are apt to work like the foolish carpenter who cuts his first rafter, then uses the first as a pattern for his second, the second to cut the third and so on until his first mistake is multiplied tenfold and he’s wonders why his roof is going downhill.

It’s hard enough to build using the measure of the eternal the Lord gives to us. I want to do what is right but the urge to protect myself, to feed my ego, to do things my way are strong and pull me off the mark. It is the beauty of holiness that, as we are seeking God, even our errors become beauty marks. As we see our sins for what they are, they move us closer to the truth. I was working on with an oddball program the other day which inserted an image of the user’s signature into a form letter. When a new person took the position, a new signature image was created and inserted but the location was off. I was working with one of our QA engineers to fix it. I changed the code, and he gave me feedback as to how that changed the printed letter. I kept changing parameters until the new signature aligned perfectly. Each attempt was a “mistake” until the last bullseye.

I have no idea what God is doing “from beginning to end”. I should probably stop pretending that I have any idea what He is doing with me. Paul said we need to be careful as “knowledge puffs up” – or “blows us up real good” as they used to say on the Farm Film Report. Here’s how Eugene Peterson translates part of First Corinthians 8:1-3:

We sometimes tend to think we know all we need to know to answer these kinds of questions—but sometimes our humble hearts can help us more than our proud minds. We never really know enough until we recognize that God alone knows it all.

Even when we are plumb with God, the nights get dark and sometimes cold and lonely. If we would admit it, we are a little scared, perhaps wanting to hide under the covers where it seems the world is smaller and protected and more under our control. Don’t give in to the temptation. If we call on God and trust Him, we will find that He will give us something warm and fuzzy to ease our fears. Embrace it. It is still a mystery – a fuzzy mystery, but that’s Him.