The part we overlook can sometimes be the most beneficial

I promised a post on 1 Corinthians 13 and I'm giving it.

1 Corinthians 13:11-13
11 When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. 12 Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
13 Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

A girl is standing in a dark room. She sees two mirrors. The first mirror she comes to is supposed to tell her who God sees her as and who He wants her to be. But for some reason the mirror has clouds all over it. No matter what she does she can't get them to go away. She desperately wants to see herself for who God has made her, but she simply can't. The second mirror she walks to is supposed to show her what her life is going to look like and the reasons behind what has happened in her life. Still, that mirror too, is cloudy. She becomes frustrated as she feels her mind begin to cloud over along with the mirror. She knows that God is with her and that her life will file out the way it is supposed to, but she wants to understand NOW. Her knowledge of everything she thought she knew seems so weak, her thoughts becoming an entanglement of chaos and confusion, hurt and trampled. The first mirror clears out ever so often, bits and pieces as she begins to understand who God sees her as being and what God has placed in her heart. But then the mirror clouds back over as her desperation strengthens; sometimes she gets frustrated with it and sometimes she gets a peace that it's ok. The second mirror does the same as the first. In the same moment of clearing something in her life unfolds and she looks back and realizes what steps got her to that place. But there is still so much cloud in front of her mirror that she begins to wonder if God has a hand on the things in her life.




I have always looked over the verses above, not understanding them completely. I loved the first section of it and verse 13: all about what love is, but the stuff in the middle? Naw, I never really thought twice about it, sort of confused when I read it and why it would be stuck in the middle of the love chapter. As I was reading it a few weeks ago something hit me. It wasn't even exactly about what I just wrote up there, but God works in cool ways, doesn't He? You read the same thing at two different times and can get two different things out of it.

We see things in part. We understand things in part. We reason what we think we understand and what we think we see in part. We get frustrated with God, or more so, at ourselves when stuff unfolds in our lives that we don't understand fully. We make stupid decisions and don't understand how they can ever be put back together. We destroy a chance to witness to someone who doesn't know Christ and end up putting the blame on ourselves and think it's hopeless because of us. A relationship is put to test and it ends, leaving us thinking we are left to dry (Twilight's second book New Moon is ringing in my ears, haha, what a sad book so far! It made me cry. :( ). God works everything for the good of those who love Him, right? Right. It's a verse I quote all the time even if I don't know where it's found (Corinthians or Galatians or Romans or something). So through our complete and utter mess of things by ourselves God crafts something beautiful. We are given free choice. But God still knows what we will choose and when we will choose it. That's not to say that we should continue on sinning, but the things that have already happened and the areas of our lives that we don't have control over are to be in God's all seeing, full-part plan.

Have you ever seen the movie Clue? I was watching it the other night and I couldn't help but laugh at the irony. When the first man gets shot/killed in the dark they all freak out. The lights turn on and the man is lying on the floor dead. They immediately point fingers at each other and go running from room to room like chickens with their heads cut off trying to gain some closure. Meanwhile, the culprit is right in front of their noses, the guy who no one even thinks to question, the guy who is the narrator for the whole thing: the butler. It just made me chuckle as I thought about how we can go around just like that, so focused on the immediate dilemma and on our immediate circumstances that we don't see the grander picture, and in that viewpoint, see things for what they really are & quite possibly how God wants them to span out.


What I got out of this a few weeks ago was about love. I found it cool that this was put square in the middle of a whole chapter of love. Love being the whole, knowledge and what we think we know being the part. And what is love really? I love my girlfriend who I have been dating for two weeks, I love macaroni and cheese, I love your shoes! Is the love they are talking about here that kind of love? Naw, dude. When I read this I began to think about how we see love in part because we look through our knowledge. We get so caught up in what we think love is, the emotions that we go through, the heartbreak that goes on when it comes to an end. When we were in New York you could clearly see the difference. The young couples were all googly-eyed at each other, near to all over each other (or as much as they could with the strict restrictions put on them, haha) and would make anyone in close proximity of their stares want to throw up. :P Then I watched the older couples, the ones that have been married for years. There was something different about the look in their eyes. Wisdom...or exhaustion, one can't be so sure. But for this purpose let's say wisdom. ;) And you could tell that they had to learn to love each other past all the lovey-dovey stuff. Not that the young love stuff is bad, don't attack me on that, but there is definitely a difference. It just opened my eyes a bit more to how we have a hard time seeing past what is going on in our life right now: in all situations, not just the love stuff I'm talking about right here.



All that up there is to say that I am always in continued amazement of how God works everything for His good. It doesn't all end pretty: I think about Adam McCain's story about how God was telling him to tape record his testimony on a tape recorder and give it to his uncle who didn't know Christ every Christmas for a few years. But every Christmas, Adam kept saying "no" and "no" and "no, not now". Then a few weeks after Christmas one year Adam's uncle got in a car accident (I'm pretty sure) and died. He was brought to tears upon telling that story as the guilt that was on him surfaced. Sometimes God has to teach us a lesson so we can grow, and so other people around us can grow as well. I think about all the people that have listened to that story and who have been touched enough to move when God tells them. Not only did it teach him something he will never forget, but it taught countless others around him the same.

It gives me peace that even though the mirrors are cloudy now, and sometimes I feel like a storm is on them rather than just peaceful Florida clouds,God is still working His good and perfect will through it. I just have to seek His whole, perfect love, rather than my imperfect, childish knowledge. Through the battles, the fleeing from evil, the hurt, and it all, that is enough. Let us seek You, above all else.