10 Things to Remember about God’s Providence in Our Lives

What follows is an excerpt from You Can Trust God to Write Your Story: Embracing the Mysteries of Providence by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and Robert Wolgemuth. Get a copy this month for a gift of any amount.

God is writing a Story—the Story of redemption. It is grander and greater than anything we can imagine. Here are some important things we need to remind ourselves often about His Story and how it relates to the story He is writing in and through each of our lives:

1. Our individual stories are part of a much bigger Story.
   At times, we will experience heartache, loss, disappointment, and unfulfilled longings. But He is weaving all of that into a Story that will have us lost in wonder and worship when we get to the end.
2. Ultimately, this Story is not about us, but about Him.
   We are but players in His Story. We are not the stars. He is!
3. Perspective makes all the difference.
   God sees the beginning and the end and everything in between; we only see this present moment. In storytelling language, His is an omniscient point of view, whereas ours is limited to what we can perceive from our earthly vantage point. He has a wide-angle lens and sees the whole mural He is painting in all of history. We see only the little speck of time and space we occupy at this moment.
4. God works in unexpected, unexplainable ways to accomplish His purposes.
   We should not expect Him to write our story the way we would write it.
5. God sovereignly and purposefully ordains and orchestrates the circumstances of our lives.
   There is no such thing as happenstance or accident. Nothing catches Him off guard. There is no plot twist in your story or ours of which He is unaware or that He can’t overcome.
6. What we see now is not the whole story.
   If we could see what God sees and know what He knows, our hearts would be at peace.
7. We can trust Him to write the story of those we love.
   That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help or support them. But we don’t want to rescue them from circumstances that may be a chapter of the story He is writing in their lives.
8. The challenges we face may be a part of God writing someone else’s story.
   God wants to use our story to be a means of His grace and intervention in the lives of others—even those who may have “wrecked” our story.
9. Those who trust in Him will never be disappointed.
   Not every chapter in this life has a “happy” ending. But every true child of God will live “happily ever after.” We can be sure of that.
10. You can trust God to write your story…
    and you can be sure that in the end, He will right your story!

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