Ever Wonder What God is Doing?

“Beloved, we are God’s children now and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is.”

I John 3:2

When I first came to Frankfurt there was a really ugly, abandoned building on this lot.  When I came back five months they had started to tear it down.  Because there was asbestos in the building, taking it down took many months.  Finally, they began to build a new building here on this spot.  The whole process from tearing down the old, to building this beautiful new building took over three years.  I have walked or driven by the building pretty much every day since I arrived in Germany.  It’s right on the way to Trinity.  For a long time, I watched and wondered – what are they doing?  What will the new building look like when it’s finished?  What purpose will the new building serve?  For a long time, this place looked only like a mess.  Even as things began to take shape, what they were building remained a mystery.  Only now, when everything is done – do we really see what they were building – a brand new class room building for one of Frankfurt’s Universities. 

Sometime life is like that.  You look at the things happening and you wonder, “Why?  Why did my Aunt get cancer?  Why did I lose that job?”  Something unexpected, unplanned for happens… it changes all our plans and we wonder, “What is God doing?”    Part of that is that we live in the middle of whatever God is doing.  Construction is underway, but the end product is not yet evident.  Someone recently compared it to looking at the underside of a quilt.  The underside has strings hanging everywhere.  It looks like a mess.  Only from the top side can you see the beautiful design of the quilt. In the same way, we see life from the underside of the quilt.  At times life looks like a mess.  There doesn’t seem to be any design.  You can’t see from our side what God is doing.  It’s no wonder we sometimes question Him, even get angry when things happen that hurt, that don’t make sense to us. 

I want to share with you today a couple of things about God that help me at such moments. The first thing is that God is a master architect.  He is the creator.  Look at the world around you and you see what great and beautiful things He has made.  It’s like this building behind me.  I would never have known how to build such a structure.  But the architects, the designers, the builders – they knew how to do it.  Our God can do anything. 

What’s more, our God really cares about us.  You could tell that these builders really cared about what they were doing here.  Think about the time they took to do a great job.  Look at the beautiful building that resulted.  In the same way, even when we have no idea what God is doing, we do know that He loves us.  We know because He gave His own Son.  His Son lived and died for our sins, then rose again because God wants to spend forever with us.  Obviously God loves us.   We can trust Him.  After all “if God did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also along with Him freely give us all things?”

Finally, even if we only see things from the underside of the quilt, God sees everything from the top. He knows what He is doing.  Like this building, when God is done with His work on your life and mine, He will have created a masterpiece.  After all, we have His promise.  “Behold, I am making all things new!”    As John put it in His first Epistle, “Beloved, we are God’s children now and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is.”  That’s what God is doing.  Amen.