The Way ✦ When It Doesn't Make Sense
Isaiah 55:8-9 | Monday, May 25, 2026
– 3 min read
The Scene
She did everything right.
She spent three years building the program from nothing — nights, weekends, budget she had to fight for every quarter. The results were real and documented. Her director called it the best initiative the department had launched in a decade. She presented it to leadership six months ago and the room was engaged, the questions were good, the energy was exactly what it needed to be.
Last Tuesday her director called her into his office and told her the program was being discontinued. Budget reallocation. Nothing personal. The work was excellent. The timing was wrong.
She drove home and sat in the driveway — not crying, just still. Three years. Documented results. A room full of engaged leadership. And it is gone in a Tuesday afternoon conversation.
She has been a believer long enough to know she is supposed to trust God in this. She does not doubt that he is there. What she cannot figure out — what keeps surfacing at 6 a.m. when she wakes up before her alarm — is why. Not why in an angry way. Why in the way of someone who genuinely cannot see how this connects to anything that makes sense.
She has asked. The answer has not come.
Scripture
Isaiah 55:8-9
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
The Teaching
This is not a verse about God being mysterious for the sake of it. It is a verse about scale.
The gap between God's ways and ours is not the gap between two people who see things differently. It is the gap between the heavens and the earth — a distance so vast that the comparison itself is meant to stop us from thinking we can close it by thinking harder. God is not withholding the explanation. He is operating from a vantage point that is categorically different from the one available to you from inside the pit.
Joseph knew something about this. His brothers stripped him of his coat, threw him in a pit, and sold him to traders heading to Egypt — and Joseph had done nothing to deserve any of it. He had the dreams. He knew God had spoken something over his life. And then he was at the bottom of a hole watching his brothers eat lunch twenty feet above him, and nothing about the pit connected to anything the dreams had promised.
From inside the pit, it made no sense. From outside the story — from the vantage point of Genesis 50, where Joseph stands as second in command of Egypt and tells his brothers you intended to harm me, but God intended it for good — the pit was not the interruption to the story. It was the path to it. Joseph could not see that from inside it. He was not supposed to. God's ways were higher than his ways — not because God was withholding, but because the distance between where Joseph stood and where God was working was exactly that large.
The pit was not a mistake. It was a passage.
The Way Before You
The thing that happened — the program discontinued, the relationship ended, the door closed, the diagnosis that arrived without invitation — does not have to make sense from where you are standing for God to be working from where he is standing.
That is not a sentiment. It is a structural fact about the relationship. His ways are higher than your ways. The gap is real and it is large and it is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is the nature of trusting a God whose vantage point is categorically different from yours.
Joseph could not see Egypt from the pit. He trusted anyway — not because he understood, but because he knew who had given him the dreams. The pit was not the end of the story. It was not even close to the end.
You are not at the end either. You are inside a story whose last chapter has not been written yet. The why you are looking for is not hidden from you to frustrate you. It is unfolding at an altitude you cannot yet see.
Trust the one who can.
Reflection
Where have you been demanding an explanation from God before you will trust him — and what would it mean to trust him without one?
Prayer
Lord, I do not understand this. I have asked and the answer has not come and I am not going to pretend that is easy. But I know your ways are higher than mine. I know the pit is not the end of the story. I am choosing to trust the one who can see what I cannot. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Walking in The Way — Today's Step ⭐
Today I will: Name the thing I have been demanding an explanation for — and release it to God without requiring one before I trust him.
I will watch for: The moment I reach for an answer that has not come — and choose trust instead of waiting for understanding.
Learn more about The Guardians' Cross → theguardianscross.org
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