When You Can Only See A Step Ahead

I've been very busy lately.  It's my husband's extremely busy season at work, we have two young (5 and 2 1/2) very active boys, and I've found a variety of things in church and in the community in which to be involved.  On Sunday mornings I have Sunday school and church; on Monday mornings, I go to a community women's Bible study; one Monday per month I go to a writing group; on Tuesdays I meet friends for coffee; on Wednesday nights I have a class at church, on two Thursday mornings per month I have MOPS; on [some] Saturday afternoons I go to football games.  I have also been reading various books in order to review them.

It is the various readings for classes and reviews that I have found interesting, lately, because they all seem to somehow connect.

When I read the first couple of chapters of Jesus: A Theography by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola, I then read the accounts of creation in The Story version of the Bible for a Sunday School class.  I read What Matters Most by Leonard Sweet, in which he discusses the relationship between Abraham and God.  I then read that part of the Bible in The Story.  I am reading The Good and Beautiful God for my Wednesday night class, and chapter one had some insight about the Holy Spirit that is relevant to another writing project I am working on.  In chapter 3 of Jesus: A Theography, there is a discussion of man, woman, and the Hebrew word ezer that will be useful to my (tentatively titled) "Women Leaders in the Bible" Sunday School curriculum I'm writing to use at church beginning in January.

When connections like this occur, it is very hard to believe they are random; I do believe there is some meaning behind them.  It has been happening with other events in my life as well.  Last February my life was "interrupted" due to moving to a new town, and this fall I began going to a Bible study that had decided to use Priscilla Shirer's Jonah:  Navigating a Life Interrupted as the curriculum for this semester.  Last Tuesday I was talking to someone about the seminary her husband attended and my familiarity with it; a few days later I got some information from the seminary in the mail (I am on their prospective student list so it's not totally out of the blue, but it is only the 2nd or 3rd time I've gotten something in the mail).  Today, a Facebook friend and I were apparently writing things that had to do with each other around the same time.

I think there were more "coincidences", but I haven't been writing them all down, unfortunately.

As I have been sitting here reflecting on these, I thought of two verses from the Bible:

• "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known." --1 Corinthians 13:12   

• "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." --Psalm 119:105   

While I sense that there is something brewing with all of the "coincidences" that seem to be happening, I only know a tiny bit--if even that--of what it means.  I don't have full knowledge, only partial.  I can't see the light on the path ahead; I can only somewhat see what is directly in front of me.  The intuitive and faithful part of me knows that somehow, someway, God is working through all of these, yet the rational and impatient part of me wants to know WHAT God is doing and WHY God is doing it and WHEN I am going to find out what it is all about.

What has God been behind in your life, that although you could sense it, you could only see tiny pieces at a time?  How did it turn out?