I found this illustration from Jen Wilken's None Like Him: 10 Ways God is Different from Us to be so profound and incredibly challenging. In these few paragraphs she tells how her grade school teacher also taught her about time. I leave it to you, dear reader, and pray it may somehow be an encouragement wherever you are today...
Each Monday she instructed the class to take out their journals and write at the top of the page: "Today is Monday. Yesterday was Sunday. Tomorrow is Tuesday." The class followed her instructions and harmony reigned.
Her difficulty began on Tuesday when the process was repeated. As soon as she gave the instruction to write "Today is Tuesday," looks of concern would flood her students' faces. With the instruction to write "Yesterday was Monday" a hand would go up.
"Mrs. Greak, you told us today is Monday."
"No, Monday was yesterday. Today is Tuesday."
More worried looks. Another raised hand.
"Mrs. Greak, you told us tomorrow is Tuesday."
"No, today is Tuesday. Tomorrow is Wednesday."
Following this pronouncement, the children would get upset. From their perspective Mrs. Greak had stated a complete contradiction: She had told them first that today was Monday and then that today was Tuesday. Which was it? Could this woman be trusted to teach them addition if she couldn't even nail down what today was?
Of course, both statements were perfectly true. But because five-year-olds do not yet grasp the concept of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, they questioned her grasp on logic. The problem was not with the message. The problem was with the limited ability of the hearer to understand it.
We are like this.
We read the promise that God makes everything beautiful in its time, and we look at the unresolved sorrows and hurts of our lives and the lives of others. And we begin to worry that the Bible cannot be trusted. We forget that we are receiving instruction from the One whose perspective is not incrementally greater than ours, but infinitely greater. On a spiritual-insight scale from zero to God, we would be pathologically prideful to rate ourselves at kindergarten level. We must be neither surprised nor discouraged to find that we, who are of yesterday and know nothing, are at a loss to comprehend the timing of the One who transcends yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
We cannot expect to understand our own history or collective human history this side of glory, but we can trust our yesterday, today, and tomorrow to the One who was, and is, and is to come (pp. 73-74).