A work in progress

If you are alive today, you are a work in progress. Unfinished. Still being refined. Untangled. Strung with pearls.

Sometimes you have to table your doubts like the dust on a working machine. If your faith is still working, maybe now is not the time to clean the cobwebs, read the books about the doubts you have. Maybe you need to lean on just a few words, like I am today: "Lord, I believe. Help thou my disbelief." (Mark 9:24)

Maybe there is beauty you can see today. Maybe you can mark it down in your mind on that endless list of gifts, blessings sent down from the Father of Lights.

Maybe you are peering into the dark for the beauty. Maybe you are holding your head in your hands, a head full of ache, a soul of distress, on the foggy moorland, wandering through the peat bogs, searching for home. Maybe today is more Wuthering Heights than Anne of Green Gables. Maybe it is an Isaiah day, a Lamentations day, maybe you can't end the Psalm yet with the praise part.

He is already there. Where you are finished, where He is finished with your refinement. He stands at the end of time, at the beginning of time, unbounded and with eyes seeing everything start to finish. As you hold your aching heart tight, against the hurts bound to come today, remember, He is there to bind those wounds. If not today, if you walk today wounded and the Savior does not come with His healing today, there is a day coming. The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the LORD binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted. (Isaiah 30:26).

When you will see the tears in the precious bottle, when you will see your name engraved on the palms of the suffering Savior's hands -reach out and touch those holes from the nails He lay still to be pierced for you - and in the pages of His book of life, when you will be unbounded by the darkness of time and you will see. He is giving you beauty for ashes.