For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:9
My son Jackson was riding in the back seat of the car one day, when he posed an interesting question. “Mom, what is the point of having a rear-view mirror when all I can see in it is your face?” he asked. It took my wife a second to realize what he was asking, but from his perspective, he couldn’t see anything useful in the mirror. My wife responded by saying that to him it didn’t look like it was useful, but from where she was sitting, she could see the things that were necessary for her to see.
What a tremendous parallel that is to the way we see versus the way God sees. Often, we question God’s timing or His movements on this earth because we can only see it from our skewed perspective. But as for God, He sees everything that He needs to see in the world. To a person in the driver’s seat, the rearview mirror provides a tremendous vantage point that may seem worthless to a passenger in the back seat of the car. How foolish it is for us to question God when He is an omniscient, all-knowing, loving Father. He sees things from a viewpoint that we know nothing of. The comforting poem I highly recommend by Grant Colfax Tullar called The Weaver carries the line that reads, “Oft times He weaveth sorrow; and I in foolish pride, forget He sees the upper and I the underside.” We cannot see the “big picture” the way God does. We cannot understand all the things that God understands. So it just stands to reason that we would feel that God may be making a mistake when, in fact, all is right with the world the way He has it planned.
The parallel that struck me as most significant in Jackson’s story was that as long as he could see his mom’s face in the rearview mirror, it meant that she could see the road the way she needed to see it. When our focus is only on God’s face, then that means we are resting and trusting in Him to do His work in our lives and to work everything out for our good. The closing lines of Tuller’s poem sum up God’s purposes completely: “He knows, He loves, He cares; nothing this truth can dim.
Read also: Isaiah 55:6-13
Quote of the day: “God knows what’s best because He knows us better than we know ourselves.”