11/02/2025
The God of love!
If I were granted three wishes, one of them would not be to know what the future holds. You can keep your crystal balls. Most of us have enough trouble wrestling with certain evil days from our past.
For some of us, that evil day was when we sat in divorce court. For others, that evil day was when we drove away from a cemetery with the passenger seat empty of the love of our lives. For others, that day was actually a year or decade of abuse, addiction, prison, or the slow strangle of despair.
I don’t know your story, but I bet you have one. Broken relationships, broken hearts, broken promises—they all melt into the ink of tears with which we write our stories.
As I read back over those darkest years of my life, I'm reminded of the Portuguese proverb that says God writes straight with crooked lines. I stumbled down labyrinthine paths, crawled in and out of cavernous pits, got lost a million times, and somehow ended up a little farther down the road to healing.
Yet in all those crooked lines I see the hand of God writing straight.
I'm not saying that I finally see how God's plan unfolded in my life. I don't. I’ll never understand why some things happened. All I know is that they did. They ultimately did because I’m a deeply flawed sinner, living shoulder-to-shoulder with others who are screw ups like me, and we’re all trying to limp through life in a world where stupid and senseless things happen with predictable regularity.
There are crooked lines everywhere we look.
What I can tell you is that the hands that write straight with these crooked lines have everlasting scars that tell of crucified love. I can tell you that down every labyrinthine path, in every cavernous pit, wherever we’re lost, there’s a God of compassion hot on our heels. And he’s the God willing to bleed to get us back.
That blood of that God, our Lord Jesus, painted the ground beneath his cross with crooked lines that write straight these words: All for you.
