Dear Father, When Mary gave birth to Jesus, there was no room for them in the inn, so He was laid in a manger--a place where animals eat. There is an aspect of Your ways we seldom consider: Your illustrative nature. I have noticed how often You tell stories through the lives of people. Like when You asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, he had no idea he was foreshadowing the death of Jesus Christ. Or when Mary laid Jesus in a manger, she could not have known it pointed to Him as the “Lamb of God.” And in what seemed to be the consequence of disobedience, Jonah spent three days in the belly of a great fish, not knowing that this moment would become a living illustration of the death and burial of Your Son, Jesus. What amazes me, Father, is that You have not stopped telling stories. Yet in every one of these stories, the actors had no idea they were part of a bigger picture, acting out a divine script. This makes me ponder which occurrences in my life that did not seem to make sense were, in fact, part of Your divine script. How often do we miss the story because we are more occupied with the weight of the moment? Your stories are often for Your glory, and the only way we can mirror this truth on earth is to embrace an attitude of thanksgiving, even when we do not understand; because the story is not perfected by our understanding; the story is perfected by the glory it creates. Translations; Slide 1: English Slide 2: French Slide 3: Bengali Slide 4: Hindi Slide 5: Urdu #LettertoGod #storytelling #illustrations #patterns