"I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me" (Isaiah 45:5).
These were words addressed to Cyrus king of Persia, and they revealed to him the secret of his life.
Just for a moment the curtain is lifted and we see that back of all the conscious aims and motives of Cyrus, there is the hand of God, although Cyrus didn't know it. Just as for our lives, there is a plan of God. We are being trained and disciplined and led when we never know anything about it. If Joseph and Job and many others had been given the choice, they certainly never would have chosen such things as they experienced. There are cruel intrusions in our lives we never would have chosen. Should we take up a quarrel against life? Become angry because our plans are shattered? Consider that blind fury engineers our circumstances? This is the very time to recognize that God is girding us, although we may not know about it, because His plans are larger than ours. His plans include the bitter and the sweet.
There is room in them for loss and sorrow. They embrace the cross as surely as the crown. The beautiful thing is that this large ordering is the ordering of a Father's love so that ALL THINGS work together FOR OUR GOOD. The big plans of Love have room even for the things we resent as unhappy intrusions. In disappointments, accidents, sicknesses and heart-breaks, Love is busy girding all the time. This truth is bound up in the doctrine of God's Fatherhood. A father does not only clothe his children; he prepares them for the years to come. He does not only supply bread for today; he trains them for tomorrow. When we say,
"Our Father," it is tied in with the liberating thought that Love is girding whether we know it or not. We are not really here to understand but to walk by faith. When at last we climb the hill to where Love has its eternal habitation, we'll look back and see with perfect clearness all of the unconscious girding and know that EVERYTHING was in the plan of Heaven.
