Gaps in Your Story

Last night at our Launch Bible study, we continued our series on the life of David. We talked about the strange story where David, after finally solidifying his place as king, decides to bring the Ark of the Covenant back to the tabernacle. This visible sign of the presence of God had been languishing away in a small town in Judah f0r many years and David felt that it was time that it came back home.

There was much celebrating and rejoicing as the ark was carted down the road until the ox cart hit a bump, the ark began to slide off the cart, and a man named Uzzah reached out and grabbed it to prevent it from falling. In response, God struck Uzzah dead instantly.

This story is challenging, difficult to understand. It seems like such an overreaction on God’s part to kill someone for attempting to save the ark from crashing to the ground even if it violated some rule about not touching it. Even David, the man after God’s heart, was angry and frustrated. He went home without the ark, deciding that it wasn’t worth the trouble or danger.

There are a lot of stories like this one in the Bible.  Stories where it seems that things don’t make sense, where God doesn’t make sense. It seems that God can be angry, capricious, violent and vindictive.

But maybe sometimes we just don’t know all the details. Maybe there are gaps in the story.

Maybe Uzzah and his family had mistreated the ark for the years that they had possession of it. Maybe they had a long pattern of disregarding God’s desires and God’s way of treating his tangible presence among the people. Maybe the casual way he reached out and touched the ark (which was supposed to be carried by Levites using long poles rather than on a cart) was symptomatic of decades of controlling God and practicing the faith his way. And maybe God needed an event like this to serve as a wake-up call to remind the nation of his holiness and power as their faith was about to be renewed under David’s leadership.

Maybe none of that is true, but the reality is that we don’t know what is in the gaps in the story.

And we don’t know what is in the gaps in our stories.

When challenges happen, when our stories take sharp turns in unexpected or undesired directions, when we don’t know or understand what God is doing, maybe we don’t know the whole story. Maybe there are plot twists that are about to happen that we won’t see resolved for years down the road. Or like a poor movie, maybe they will never be resolved to our satisfaction.

But maybe they will. And as we learn to trust God through the gaps, we can experience a sense of peace in the middle of the turmoil.

When have you seen gaps in your story filled in years later? What gaps are happening right now in your life that you don’t understand where you may need to seek a new perspective?