"Se."

A few years back, when I was in the midst of a situation I was completely unsure how to handle, and desperately needing God to direct me clearly, one early morning I found a message written in the sunrise-pinkened clouds. It was one word, and that in a foreign language, but it's the only foreign language I know any of. There in the east, where He knew I'd be looking, was the word se. In Spanish, it means, "I know."

In that moment, in the midst of all the questions raging through my heart and mind, all the uncertainty and nervousness and even doubt that I'd be able to discern God's voice amid the storm of my own emotions, that one word spoke volumes to my soul.

It was a reminder that He knew both my heart, and my situation. He knew. He knows. Intimately, at levels only He could ever understand, the levels I can just never seem to get into words or music or any other means of expression--He knows. Always. Se is present tense; and our God is ever-present.

It was a reminder that He was aware of more than I could be. He knew not only where I was, but what lay ahead of me. He knew every moment leading in and out of things, all the ways He was preparing my heart and setting the stage to speak to me in ways that would be undeniable.

It was a reminder that I didn't need to know it all--that my role was to trust Him. The more often I find myself in circumstances where I must deliberately give up my desire to know all the answers, the more often I wind up realizing later that if I'd known, I either would have fainted and given up, or my brain would have exploded. Either way, not very pretty. God's ways are truly higher than ours, and His thoughts are as far above ours as the heavens are above this tiny blue-green planet we call home for now.

So if you don't know what comes next, or how you're even supposed to make it through today, find your rest in the One who knows. He is our answer. Trust me, I've been there, in that place of fear and uncertainty and complete cluelessness, feeling like a shipwreck about to happen. But He's been there with me, every step. It's not that I've never faltered, but that He's never let me go.

He has walked with me through seasons I soon looked back on with anguish and regret, wondering how I could have been so blind and foolish, and certain that nothing beautiful could ever come of these ashes. But despite my certainty and my desire that such periods be erased from my history, He has used them. He's used them in ways that continue to blow me away, for He was not oblivious to things even when I was. He knew. He always knows.

There is nothing on this earth that ever happens without Him knowing about it, without Him seeing it happen. It may seldom make sense to us, why He allows so many things to happen, if He knows. But that's the thing: He knows what's at the end of it. He sees our pain, but He also sees how it will be worked together for good in the end. Miraculously, He takes even such darkness as sin and death, and uses them to beat Satan at his own game. Our Father is never caught off His guard by anything that happens. But in His sovereignty, He works all things together for the good of those who love Him--those He's called according to His purposes. And you know what our good looks like? Being ever nearer to Him.

So whatever you may be going through right now, know this: He knows. And not just that, but He knows how He intends to use it all for His glory and your good. Those things are oddly one and the same, for our very purpose, the thing we were created for, is to glorify Him; and His glory is manifest in the way He causes all things to come together to draw us unto Him. He knows. He's got this. Trust Him.