This is my first post in a six-part series that’s linked back to Chapter 10: Quiet Times in my first book: Breadcrumbs in the Storm. It took place when our greatest storm yet faced, had just smashed into our quiet lives. We were struggling for breath and “trying to tread water” at the time. Then, some uncanny coincidences began to come to light. Supernatural connections appeared between what we were reading in the Bible, and what was actually happening all around us in 21st Century life!
But after reading my books you may be asking how someone with ‘that sort of faith’ could logically draw ‘those sorts of conclusions’. Throughout my books you will have noticed that I got most of my ideas from the Bible. So the most basic of questions, before moving off the starting blocks to go anywhere and in any direction from here, would have to be:
What makes the Bible so special? Is it really relevant today? And, why bother to read it at all?
Looking back over my own life journey, and after visiting more than 80 countries without finding another option that carries the same amount of promises in it’s message to the poor as well as to the rich, to the female as much as to the male, to the young as well as to the old and regardless of race, background, or past choices, I’d say that the Words of the Creator God are a time-honoured heroic adventure. It catalogues so accurately the stories of real people for more than two millennia. The love stories; the hardships; the natural disasters; the deceit, betrayal and murder; the all-out depravity; the wars; the prosperity; the fame and the falls. Its cliff-hanger ending in the last book, the Book of Revelation, leaves the reader expectant for what could possibly be next: an Eternity in the Kingdom of our Father God and Maker, which is filled with never-ending stories. All of them are set to include us – the people that He created in His own image! So I’m thinking that there really isn’t a moment to lose to begin reading it!
While the above may sound interesting enough so far, most people with busy lives that don’t find time to read, may wonder what this collection of ancient literature has to do with 21st century life experiences and our personal life-journeys today.
So this series of posts is also a follow-on from Chapter 1: Who’s Writing the Story? in my second book Mysterious? …expect the unexpected… In that chapter I described a bizarre start to my journey through this life. My start to life on Planet Earth was lived on the children’s ward at a local hospital for seven months in one year and close on three months the next year. This could happen to many babies, right? But what if I told you that I wasn’t sick at all! If that wasn’t strange enough, I grew up, left my home town, experienced a life that took me to every continent on the globe, but I made my ‘home base’ in the third largest city in Australia. It was there that I discovered that two of my close friends (whom I’ve known now for 30 years), had actually been nurses in training on that very same children’s ward when I was there almost a half century before!
This, and many other coincidences in my life, has made me believe ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that there has to be a Master Planner out there. The first two chapters of His ‘manufacturer’s handbook’ explains that He not only created me in His own image, He also created the environment in which He then placed me. However, the story doesn’t stop there. He’s also overseeing the Story of Life that’s unfolding on Planet Earth: the stage that He has created. Like a multi-layered epic drama, the Creator God is drawing together with perfect cohesion our individual life-stories in history – HIS-story of Humankind. He’s weaving together the threads of His most intricate tapestry in a complex way. But demonstrated in Benjamin M. Franklin’s poem The Master Weaver’s Plan, it isn’t at all as messy as it first seems…
My life is but a weaving Between the Lord and me;
I may not choose the colors– He knows what they should be.
For He can view the pattern Upon the upper side
While I can see it only On this, the under side.
Sometimes He weaves in sorrow, Which seems so strange to me;
But I will trust His judgment And work on faithfully.
‘Tis He who fills the shuttle, And He knows what is best;
So I shall weave in earnest, And leave to Him the rest.
Not ’til the loom is silent, And the shuttles cease to fly
Shall God unroll the canvas, And explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needed, In the Weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver, In the pattern He has planned.
~ Benjamin Malachi Franklin – 1882-1965 ~
You may be like me and have struggled at times with the narrative of your own storm-filled life story. Perhaps you too have questioned most especially those ‘dark threads’ that have been chosen for you. Perhaps there’s whole areas where your life is littered with unanswered questions. If you are at all interested in reading more about this Master Weaver and His Plan, and if you are at all willing to concede that the Creator’s God’s Plan has indeed been disclosed to humankind, carefully documented and then miraculously preserved for us to read today, I invite you now to click on to my next post: 1.2 What makes the Bible so special?