God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end. Ecclesiastes 3:11
Few things are more mysterious than God’s timing!
In the seventeenth century, King Louis the Fourteenth ordered oak trees planted in the royal forests for future warship masts. Growing a single mast tree takes two hundred years, so no one who planted those acorns would live to see them used.
The navy that needed them stopped building wooden warships. The trees kept growing anyway, tended by generation after generation of foresters, useful to no one in particular.
Then in April 2019, fire tore through the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and its spire collapsed into the nave for the world to watch. Rebuilding it exactly as it had been meant finding oak beams of a size and age almost impossible to locate anywhere in Europe, except in those royal forests, planted three hundred years earlier.
Nearly a thousand oaks were selected to rebuild the spire and roof. No one planted them for a cathedral. They were planted for ships that were never built, for a war that never came, by a king who had no idea what a fire in 2019 would take. What felt like three centuries of nothing was already becoming something.[1]
The Bible has a word for this pattern. It says God “has made everything beautiful for its own time” and that “people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). That isn’t a promise that every loss will make sense right now. But the God of all mysteries works all things together for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28). Even when a season feels like it’s leading nowhere, God is already at work in it.
[1] Saskya Vandoorne and Oscar Holt, “After Centuries in the Ground, These French Oaks Will Soon Form Part of the New Spire at Notre Dame,” CNN, March 25, 2021, https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/notre-dame-rebuild-oak-trees.
