T.V, Reruns, and God's plans

Every good television drama has them; little hints, seeds, foreshadowing dropped into episodes that will come to fruition later in the series. The problem is that a network television season is so long! First of all it’s on just once a week and then there are is special programming around the holidays, and then all those awards shows, and then the occasional rerun inserted for no apparent reason in the middle of the season (!) and let’s not even talk about how the “season” ends in early May and resumes in late October… So I usually find myself asking, “What was going on in this show?” Not to mention the fact of course that you’re actually living your real life while attempting to follow this fictitious reality.

I’m not sure if it’s a cable thing or a summer thing but I find that in the summer there’s usually some channel running network dramas every day and sometimes two back-to-back episodes a day. And, yes, I do get pulled into them, I admit. In two weeks I can see the entire season of a show and suddenly so many things make much more sense! Why? Well because of them being compressed I now see how things were interrelated, something I was incapable of grasping when I just saw one show only a couple times a month.

I suspect our perception of God’s plans for us is similar. We don’t understand His hand in the small stuff, or the things that seem so random in keeping with everything else going on. Things happen and they make no sense; they are seemingly not pieces of the puzzle we have in front of us. But we are hindered by time because we see our lives and events as they unfold, episode by episode if you will.

One advantage of age is the ability to look back on our lives and see them compressed. It’s the ability to view something that happened one year and something else that took place five years previous or later and see how they worked together to accomplish something greater than either of them individually. Hmm, sound like a familiar biblical concept…? (Romans 8:28)

We do not yet have the luxury of seeing our lives as a compressed rerun and having all the pieces come together for us but if television writers can make seemingly random things part of an overall theme, let us remember, as we’re enjoying old T.V. series, that God is both capable of and is doing the same thing in our real lives!