Endless Variety

My hubby loves carpentry and woodworking.  He says he's not good at it; however, he loves the smell of sawdust and the feeling of thinking something up in his own mind and seeing it come into being.

Uniformity is important in working with wood.  Symmetry.  Sameness.  The photo to the right is of something called a "jig" - which allows the carpenter to make cut after cut the exact same way with a table saw.  Over and over and over.  To me, whose art is more verbal and musical than that, that's boring.  But... it's necessary to have structure, even in writing and music!! 

I find it intriguing that the God of the universe, who is One of endless variety, would choose to be born into a family where the dad was a carpenter.  He understands from experience that the framework has to be the same.  The foundation has to be solid, the framing square. There is a certain order.  After that, creativity can be expressed and variety takes over.

Even a cursory study of the scriptures shows us that God doesn't like to be pegged.  Never, ever does He EVER do something the same way twice.  I suspect that this is so that we don't think we can figure Him out and predict what He's going to do, so that we don't get cocky.

Nature itself bears witness to His imagination and the joy He takes in creating masterpiece after masterpiece, no two alike.

Sunsets, cloud formations, all kinds of animals.  The same concept applies.  The same raw materials for the sunsets, the same basic skeletal structure for the animals.  But there the similarity ends.  God seems to take delight in doing the unexpected. 

So what makes us think that we can reduce His working down to a prescribed formula?  "A plus B equals C.  Believe this, do that, and God is obliged to deposit this desired outcome into your lap."  Vending-machine thinking!  The ones who have it all worked out to this nice, seven-steps-to-prosperity thinking have tried (and failed, might I add) to put God in a box. They somehow don't seem to realize that it's all a sham, that there is so much more to God than Him being a celestial Santa Claus who hands out rewards for being good. They've tried to put a "jig" on God.

Well, the jig is up.  Although His workings might follow a very vague pattern, there is no predicting what God will do, or what He'll use to accomplish what He wants.  He might even use things we never would have imagined - such as suffering that we brought on ourselves, even - to work out in us what He wants.  All of it is designed to get us to the point where we realize that without Him, we can do nothing in and of ourselves; we can't even believe in Him - even faith is a gift of undeserved favor from Him!  And then we ask - humbly, not demanding - for Him to live through us.  To grant His power to do what we have tried, over and over again, to do ... and failed miserably.  

At that point, when we admit that we are powerless over the fatal flaws in ourselves and in others, and ask Him to take over, that is when He breathes a sigh of relief and starts creating another masterpiece - from the inside out.