E plurimis fragmentis, unum

In spite of everything you wish for this great country of ours, where huge (if sometimes disproportionate) doses of freedom, prosperity, and biblical morality once shaped a society, maybe the very best thing now is simply to let the United States hurry toward the smashup that seems so imminent. Maybe, as Israel discovered time and time again, America needs devastation far more than it needs restoration.

For God's idea of wholeness is so very different from ours.

If in our personal lives we were always able to do things our preferred way, we'd court, fall in love with, and marry only beautiful, perfect people. Together, we'd give birth only to wonderfully behaved, high-IQ babies who turned at just the right age from compellingly cute to stunningly handsome. After those children went off to school, always bringing home perfect report cards (with no facial scars or chipped teeth along the way), they too would have storybook romances with perfect mates, leading to indestructible marriages of their own-and dozens of unimaginably defect-free grandchildren.

But God's ideals for us-first as individuals, then as families, and finally as whole societies-are frequently strangely opposite to our own. He takes what to us seems so good, either flings it or lets it crash to the ground, and watches it splinter into smithereens. Then in his own good time-which usually leaves us impatient-he reassembles those hopelessly broken pieces into his new perfection. He takes our defects and deficiencies, our inabilities and misunderstandings, and even our stubbornness and rebellion, and out of such miserable raw materials he fashions spectacular objects of awe.

His original creation was so splendid the Bible tells us he sat back, looked at it, and called it good. But the biblical evidence is strong that his redeemed re--creation will leave the original in the dust.

If we're ever caught wondering, as we certainly do, that this is God's way with his human children, we need look no further than at our elder brother-Jesus himself-to get the point. For somehow it pleased the Trinity that even the perfect glory of the Godhead would be set aside for a time so that the Son would be literally smashed in body and soul.

What he was doing instead, of course, was buying the restoration and re-creation of his chosen family. In the process, he was setting the pattern that brokenness has to precede wholeness, that chaos has to come before order, that night has to come before morning. "Unless a corn of wheat falls into the ground and dies," Jesus said, "it cannot bear fruit." He spoke uniquely of his own sacrificial death, of course. But in his typical manner of weaving multiple truths into brilliant patterns, he spoke also of the sequence that must nearly always govern our lives.

As fallen and still stubborn people, we resent that sequence. Such resentment dogs us even after we've been redeemed. We keep insisting that there must be a way to have things perfect from the beginning, and then to preserve that comfortable perfection all the way through.

Then here's the strange irony. We work overtime, and often spend inordinate resources, to avoid the very blemishes, cracks, scars, and faultlines that God typically uses to build meaning, character, holiness, and thankful hearts deep inside his children.

Most of WORLD's readers, for example, were born after the Great Depression of the 1930s. We don't remember it personally, but our parents tell us of the grim privations of those days. Yet who's to say that the net effect of those years was not in many ways a more excellent fiscal (and even moral) discipline for our society than anything that has followed in the prosperity we have enjoyed since then? The depression taught millions how to be better managers and how to turn nothing into something. Its very hardships gave birth to precisely those virtues that we have desperately needed for the last generation, but have found so lacking because the tough teacher was no longer around.

So are we to rush headlong toward hardship? Is the lesson in all this that we are deliberately to seek out pain, suffering, turmoil, and privation-even for our children-just so that their lessons cannot possibly be lost on us? Hardly. For the apostle Paul also directly teaches us to pray for kings and those in authority specifically so that "we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness." Worthwhile though it may be, trouble isn't something we're to go out and look for.

But neither is it something we Christians should work overly hard to avoid. Christians are people who refuse to panic when their personal, family, or societal lives seem to disintegrate around them. Their calm comes from the certain knowledge that God specializes in making from many pieces the kind of wholeness that causes everyone around to marvel. The marveling, however, will not be at what human hands have done, but at the glory of the God who specializes in redemption and restoration.