beyond searching out

I don't understand the ways of God. I recognize my finite mind will never fully make sense of them. This doesn't keep me from trying my hardest to wrap my mind around them. As a new year dawns, my head still spins over His working in my life over the past year. If you had asked me at the beginning of 2010 to leave teaching and embark upon a two month stint in missions, I would have called you crazy. But God's ways and methods are definitely much higher and greater than my own. He's done nothing out of character for Him. He dealt with me the same way He deals with all His children and those who came before us.

As J.I.Packer puts its so beautifully,

Still he blesses those on whom he sets his love in a way that humbles them, so that all the glory may be his alone. Still he hates the sins of his people, and uses all kinds of inward and outward pains and griefs to wean their hearts from compromise and disobedience. Still he seeks the fellowship of his people, and sends them both sorrows and joys in order to detach their love from other things and attach it to himself. Still he teaches believers to value his promised gifts by making them wait for those gifts, and compelling them to pray persistently for them, before he bestows them. So we read of God dealing with his people in the Scripture record, and so he deals with them still. His aims and principles of action remain consistent; he does not at any time act out of character. Our ways, we know, are pathetically inconstant-but not God's. (Knowing God, p.79)

Just this past year, God dealt with me in each and every one of these ways. Some He used repeatedly in order to get me to where I am now. It wasn't easy being in the middle of it, but I am overjoyed at looking back.