“For the Lord saw the affliction of Israel, which was very bitter. But he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam the son of Joash” (2 Kings 14:26-27).
In the spring of 1884, the French artist George Seurat began painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. That painting, seven feet tall and ten feet wide, hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. In the late nineteenth century, impressionism was in vogue. Seurat broke with tradition and used a novel technique called pointillism. Instead of painting with brushstrokes, Seurat employed different colored dots.
If you stand a few inches from Seurat’s magnum opus, it’s anything but art. You’re too close to see it for what it is. It looks like a hodgepodge of dots, thousands of dots. But when you back up, you see an absolute masterpiece.
The same could be said of the circumstances you find yourself in. Up close, your life appears as a bunch of disconnected, random, often meaningless dots.
But if you back up, the dots blend together to form a masterpiece. If you stand at the right distance and watch long enough, you will discover that the Artist really knew what he was doing all along. Life starts to make sense.
Recovery Step: Learn to view life from a distance. Don’t try to understand every dot.
