Part of the fun of a mystery knit along or even a mystery novel is watching seemingly random facts fuse together to become a completed pattern. It’s fun seeing the parts come together and trying to guess what it will become. I especially like the pictures in puzzle magazines that look like a jigsaw puzzle with random pieces marked with dots. For those pieces, you color them in with ink and eventually a picture emerges.
What is not fun is when random events happen in your life and you cannot see the pattern. Where is God in the midst of aggravations, illnesses, losses and frustrations? Why is this happening? What purpose could their possibly be?
When I play Slingo, an electronic form of Bingo, I try to have a plan of attack to reach the goal of that particular board. I follow a pattern. One level I had played over and over again with no success, and I was getting frustrated. The last time I played it there was no way to follow a pattern the way the game was going, and I had already come to the conclusion that I was not going to win this round either. However, out of the seemingly random moves, I completed the round. It was all by chance…or was it?
In life God sometimes uses a series of seemingly random events to get us to a particular place at a particular time in order to be of use to Him. The Bible says, “Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14). We must trust that God has a plan for these moments and pray to be of use in these moments. Maybe the problems you are struggling with were meant to bring you to “such a time as this”. What seems random to us is just another piece of the puzzle to God…a piece He is putting into place so that the bigger picture can be revealed.