Chaotic Faith Rambling.

At time in life, it seems as though we may be caught in the midst of chaos. In literature the word is derived from the Greek who gave this name to the original nothingness from which Gaia and the other protogenitors emerged. Another way of putting it is that it is the unpredictable gaping whole from which existence came. Even in the Bible chaos seems to be the formless and void earth that existed before God spoke Creation into being.
Chaos has another meaning, though, in mathematics. In my own limited understanding, I will attempt an explanation. Chaos is a series of events that is unpredictable but is dependent on the initial circumstances. In this kind of chaos, we can know the end and see the beginning, but what goes on in between will remain a mystery to observers.
For the everyday bystander, the world would seem to appear in chaos. Some of us know the beginning and the end while we worry and stand amazed at the randomness of life. Other folks claim that we cannot know either the beginning or the end and should embrace the chaos, making sense of the here and now. Still others claim they can even know what the future holds and they sell their answers on late night television. Regardless of the position you hold, the fact is that we do not know everything that will happen in the kind of safe detail we would like to. The result is fear which we respond to in any number of ways. One of these ways is to turn to God.
As I read from the beginning of Jeremiah last night, I stopped in verses 4 & 5. God's words to Jeremiah were that He had known him before he was formed in the womb. Before he was born, God had set him apart and given him the role of a prophet. I paused to reflect here because I realized that God had indeed done this for me as well. I, too, was known by God before I was formed. Before I was around to breathe, God has set me apart for my calling.
Currently, I am in a jobless state of flux. The way this situation came about was not normal or pretty. Because of this, I have drifted from God and wondered about His plans and His cryptic message to me several months ago: "Trust Me." Then I read these words. The number of brush strokes I take to clean my teeth He knows. The number of hairs on my head He knows. Where I will be working come August, He knows.
Though this isn't easy to accept, it is a faith conditioning exercise. For each of us there is a calling that we have been set apart for. Like Jeremiah, we may not think ourselves worthy, or maybe we want to go somewhere else like Jonah. God, though has set us apart for the moment we are in and He knew before we did that we would doubt and worry. He was prepared for it. He knows the begining and He knows the end. He has shared these things with us. It is the seeming chaos in the middle we have trouble with. But if we read this passage and others like it correctly, there is really no chaos. He set us in this time, this moment, with a job to do. We just have to trust Him. He gave Jeremiah the words to say, and He will equip us as well. Like Matthew Henry wrote in his commentary, "Original endowment, not education, makes a prophet." Whatever your gift and calling, the same is true of it.
There is not real chaos, just some details we don't know. The truth is that God set all of this into motion, He placed you strategically where you are in space and time according to His strategy. AS hard as it can be at times, just trust Him.