There’s something soothing about watching people on YouTube doing acrylic art, a single hand brushing colors across a blank white canvas, accompanied by a soft piano instrumental in the background.

The artist starts by squeezing spots of paint on the canvas, then begins blending the paint together, adding other colors as needed. And slowly and gradually he creates something beautiful, a nice scenery, perhaps a colorful sunset – a white sun just above the horizon, cutting a bright path in the paint below it.

The picture is already stunning, streaks of blue and purple and orange and yellow. Then on the seemingly finished picture, the artist suddenly draws a dark black gash across the canvas. It looks terrible at first, like the artist is ruining the picture, but as I watch, more unexpected colors and lines come together and form another element to the distance. And now the picture is truly complete.

As beautiful as the sunset is, it needs something else in the frame, something to catch the eye, something to take the painting to another level. The artist has it all planned out from the beginning. He knows exactly what he is doing.

Sometimes it seems our lives are fine enough, decent and normal and pleasant. Then something incomprehensible happens, something not quite right, something we do not expect. For a while, we struggle along, trying to make sense of it. And then enough time passes and one day, we look back and realize that it was the right and necessary addition to the picture of our lives.

We think we know how everything should turn out, but we don’t. Only God knows what the picture of our lives needs, and only God knows what the finished picture should look like.

Joy Tie, USA