The Story Was Larger Than We Thought

"...How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!" - Romans 11:33 (NIV)

For years you have lived beside a stream. You know its bends and the shallow place where you cross. It feels like a small thing, mostly yours. Then one day you follow it farther than before, and it joins a river so wide you cannot see the far side, a river that has been carrying your stream toward the sea the whole time. The stream is no smaller than it was. You have only learned what it always belonged to.

Life with God can feel like that. You reach a place where trust is steady, and you assume the rest is mostly that steadiness deepening in you. Near the end of a letter to the followers of Jesus in Rome, Paul wrote about how God was gathering people no one expected into His own family. The size of it overwhelmed him. He stopped explaining and marveled, "...How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!" (Romans 11:33). He wasn't measuring his own progress. He stood inside something far larger than himself.

The same happens with us. What grows in us is real, and it matters to Him, and still it was never the center of the story. Paul didn't say the story was from him or about him. He said the opposite, that "...from him and through him and for him are all things" (Romans 11:36). It all begins in Him, and it all goes back to Him. That takes nothing away from us. The whole story was always larger than we guessed.

His work keeps widening beyond you. Long before Paul, a man named Daniel saw a kingdom in a dream, a kingdom that would gather "...all nations and peoples of every language" and never pass away (Daniel 7:14). Every people. Every language. A story that does not end. Your few years with God belong inside something that reaches every nation and never ends.

So how do you live inside a story that large? Not by shrinking, and not by making yourself bigger, but the way you would live beside that river, glad to be carried by water far stronger than you are. The day in front of you is small, but it belongs to something vast. Long ago a prophet heard God say, "...be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe" (Habakkuk 1:5). Maybe the wonder you feel some mornings is the story opening wider than you can hold. You don't have to hold it. You only have to keep walking into it. Follow the longing. He opens the way.

Prayer

Father, You are larger than we know, and Your story runs beyond us. Teach us to live gladly inside what You are doing, carried by a love that begins in You and returns to You. Amen.