The Mind of Vince

 

"Vince," my wife, Elaine, said.  "I'm looking for the CD that Elliot needs to play along with for his piano practice.  Do you know where it is?"

"Of course," Vince answered, looking at the stack of CDs he had been sorting through earlier in the day.

Our household is one of the few south of the Mason Dixon line that still listens to CDs.  I think, everyone else uses Pandora or Spotify or has reverted to vinyl.  I don't know if these silvery discs are better than MP3s, but since we own them, we still listen to them.

"Well, where is it?"  Elaine asked Vince, with a touch of frustration in her voice.

"It should be easy to find," Vince said.  "I just finished organizing them."

Elaine studied the CD boxes for a several seconds.  "How did you organize them?  They don't seem to be organized either by style of music, or alphabetically."

"Oh, I didn't organize them that way," he replied.  "I organized them by copyright date.  It makes more sense than any of the ways you mentioned."

He went over to the stack and thumbed through them.  "Here it is," he said, offering the CD to his mother.

Vince's mind works differently from mine.  It may be an obvious way to organize literature, but I can't imagine trying to find something in a library where all of the books were arranged by copyright date.

"Ah, yes sir, The Lord of the Rings you say?  That would be over here in 1954.  Right beside Wheel on the School and Horton Hears a Who!  A very good year if I might say so..."

I may not understand how my son's mind works, but I fathom even less of the mind of God.  Isaiah 55:8,9 say, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

William Cowper wrote words to a song many years ago:

    God moves in a mysterious way

      His wonders to perform.

    He plants His footsteps in the sea

      And rides upon the storm.

The problem isn't that God's ways don't have purpose.  The issue is that their purpose is far beyond my feeble ability to fathom.  It is easy to think that God doesn't know what He is doing, or worse, that He is a capricious God, vindictive, and only looking for our destruction.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

When we don't understand God's purposes in our lives, it is mainly that we don't really understand God's mind or His ways.  The best course is to trust Him and wait.

We will see that our Heavenly Father has our best purposes at heart, even when His ways are mysterious beyond our understanding.