In the middle of some confusing circumstances happening in my life right now, I keep flashing back to a funny story from my childhood. I think Papa God is trying to tell me something. I’m just not sure what.
And that’s the whole point. Sometimes we think we have something all figured out … but we don’t know nuthin’.
When I was around ten (give or take a few years), our family motored up from Florida to rural north Georgia on our annual Easter road trip to set a spell with Granny. In that red clay farmland, you don’t sit, you set a spell. Now Granny was Mama’s mama and was somewhere abouts her mid-80s at the time, a long-time widow who loved her chirren (us!) – that’s old school Georgian for “children” – but was bit crusty around the edges and suffered no nonsense from nobody.
Four months prior to our arrival, a lady friend from Granny’s church had brought her a Christmas present. Granny said she could tell it was a Whitman’s candy box right through the snowman wrapping paper. Despite her thick coke bottle eyeglasses, you couldn’t get anything by clever Granny, no sir-ee, and she didn’t have a hankerin’ for candy that tended to stick to her dentures and plug up her innards, so after the lady left, she tossed the still-wrapped gift onto the cavernous bottom shelf of the Frigidaire to save for the grands next visit.
Then in April, when we arrived hangry (we were hungry in Florida but hangry in Georgia), Granny directed us grousing chirren to the nearly forgotten box of chocolates in the Frigidaire beneath the pot of boiled okra.
Only it wasn’t.
Chocolate, I mean.
When my sister and I ripped off the gift paper and yanked the lid off the candy box, our expectant mouths already dripping saliva, we were startled to find not chocolate inside, but a well chilled Bible.
Yep, I said Bible.
A Bible that was an exact fit for a Whitman’s chocolate box. The sweet, albeit cold hard Word of God.
We all got a good belly laugh out of that one.
I’m not sure why that memory keeps reloading into my brain these days, but I suspect it has something to do with the moral of the story being that we often think we know what’s going on. The situation seems perfectly obvious to us and we’re positive we’ve got it all figured out.
Until it’s even more obvious that we don’t.
Everything falls apart and none of the puzzle pieces fit anymore.
We try our durndest to understand what the Lord is saying to us but it’s like we’re speaking Renaissance French in Afghanistan.
So my point today is to empathize with you if you’re feeling a little lost right now about a particular problem that has you flabbergasted. Something you thought you had a handle on; something you were pretty sure you’d figured out. But nay, not so. You didn’t. And now things are unraveling at an alarming rate.
I’m feeling the same way.
So I can say with assurance that it’s okay to feel temporarily lame. Or ignorant. Or even a wee bit stupid. Because our heavenly Father has the whole thing figured out. He knows there’s something much, much better than candy in that Whitman’s chocolate box. And putting it on ice for a while won’t hurt it at all. We just have to trust that He knows best how to manage His hangry chirren.
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