God at Work in Our Unfinished Stories
It’s so great having a Bible, isn’t it? You can flip from page to page, story to story, so quickly. Adam and Eve. Kings and queens. Lions and whales. A book full of stories of courage and failure, strength and collapse. The human story.
Flipping through it so easily, though, can make us forget that it actually spans thousands of years and countless generations. Across these accounts of people, families, and nations, a steady thread runs through it all: God working patiently, directing hearts and history toward His purpose.
By the time our reading brings us to the Christmas story, we’re ready for something different, for the journey to take a dramatic turn. We read about a young unmarried woman visited by an angel with a big request from God. She agreed and then had to spend nine months waiting to hold Him. Luke’s account is filled with angels singing and shepherds running, hurrying to meet the baby the world had been waiting for since chapter three of Genesis. An entire library of history had been written as God prepared the world for this moment.
All that history tells us something important, though. Humans are a mess. I mean, seriously. A mess.
It’s a little surprising that the stories God handed down to us that we call the holy scriptures are filled with messy, wild, difficult, stubborn, jealous, prideful, weird, sinful people. You would think He’d want us to only read about the noble, heroic, super-spiritual folks. But apparently God wanted us to recognize ourselves in these stories. To see ourselves in the failures, yes, but also our potential.
When Jesus arrived on this messy planet, He did not step into a well-ordered, perfect family tree. From the very first promise in Genesis, spoken right in the middle of humanity’s fall, God declared that redemption would come to these broken people living in this broken world. But God did not rush the process or clean up the mess first. He worked patiently, generation after generation, shaping hearts, forming faith, and moving His purposes forward through imperfect people.
That same God is still at work in us. God’s way has always been to fulfill His purposes through flawed people, not in spite of them. Our past, our family history, our failures, and our wounds do not disqualify us. They become the very places where God works most deeply, shaping us, refining us, and teaching us to trust Him.
God does not discard the past or pretend it didn’t happen. He takes the unfinished and the wounded and makes them places where His presence can dwell. Not to erase our story or magically fix it, but to redeem it and bring it to completion.
And that may be the real wonder of Christmas. Not that God came into a perfect world, but that He chose to come into ours. Into waiting. Into unfinished stories. Into lives where hope feels delayed. God is still doing what He has always done, working patiently and faithfully through imperfect people to bring His purposes to life.
Reflection Questions:
• When you look at your own story or family history, where do you tend to assume God is limited by the mess rather than at work within it?
• What part of your life feels slow, unfinished, or stuck right now, and what might it look like to trust that God is still shaping something meaningful there?
• Which “messy” people in Scripture do you see yourself in most, and what does their story teach you about how God works through imperfect lives?
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