The Future in His Hands

And even though sometimes Your ways
I cannot understand
I'll never walk away because
My future's in Your hands
~Running After you, Planetshakers

I'm at a point in my life now where I almost completely do not understand what God is doing with my life and in my life. Or maybe I am at a point where I finally realise that I normally don't understand anyway. I just assume. Honestly, if I truly understood, I would be 1) freaked out and 2) unable to practice faith hope, perseverance and character-building, etc.

If God told Abraham before all the trials he underwent, that he would have a son and that son would have to be sacrificed, Abraham might have baulked. But Abraham faced that final test of faith once he had undergone so many other little tests that he could reason that God could raise the dead ( a big improvement from his previous reasoning that he and Sarah were too old to have children).

So while I do understand in the present the season of life that I'm in, whether of trial, rest or spiritual revelation, the long-term outcome is not something I can ever predict with certainty. Joseph in his prison would have been hard-pressed to imagine how his dreams of bowing sheaves and stars could come true, though he seems to never have given up hope in his destiny, rising in favour even with the prison warden. In the same way, I've been asking, what is the point of all the events of my life up to now? If every moment counts toward a higher purpose, even the bad ones, then giving up in situations isn't an option. What is my purpose in Christ? I don't mean theologically--we're all predestined to glory, etc. I mean, what is my personal mission for Christ given by him? What are the good works prepared in advance for me to do, like the art and craft materials prepared by the teacher beforehand for his class? That's what I'd really like to know. Maybe that's predestination. God knows those who want to take his art class and provides the canvas and the paints and teaches us as we go. No matter how simple and unremarkable the stuff we paint is, he already knows how it will turn out and already has in his mind how he'll fit it all together with his own masterpiece, so that it becomes a thing of great beauty. And the cool thing is that in the end, we are his masterpiece--not our works, unless our works are of course other people whose lives the master artist has sculpted through us. The future in his hands is the destiny I wish to fulfil.