Providence is mysterious, God wants to keep it that way and I guess we need to get used to it.
If you’re looking for a definition here’s one from the Heidelberg Catechism;
Providence is “the almighty and ever-present power of God whereby he still upholds, as it were by his own hand, heaven and earth together with all creatures, and rules in such a way that leaves and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and unfruitful years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, and everything else, come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand” (Question 27).
As Christians we live out our lives knowing nothing takes God by surprise and nothing ever happens to us that does not come from his ‘fatherly hand’.
Why is it then that wherever I turn I keep finding Christians fighting God for the right to decide what is best for our lives. It is a rare thing to find sufficient maturity in a Christian heart that someone is ready to accept what comes from God’s hand, submit to his will and trust that what God has given will turn out to be for our good.
For those, like me, who too often want God to stop interfering in our plans here are some words of advice from CS Lewis;
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.
