When we say God works in mysterious ways . . .

. . . this is the kind of thing we mean. I tend to think that there are folks out there through whom God decides to work in absolutely atypical ways, both because of who he’s made them to be and so that their lives would serve as reminders to the rest of us that he is in no wise limited to our conventional expectations or conventional wisdom; Tyler Dawn, I think, is one of those people. From my contact with her (all electronic, alas), I can say that she’s a remarkable woman of God with a remarkable faith who doesn’t fit any pattern any church I’ve ever run across would consider to be normal; that’s just her, and that’s just God. In this case, she has an amazing testimony of how God used her—through a series of hard and unpleasant and painful things—to expose a child molester and set a child free.

Go read it, and marvel at the hand of God; and after you’ve marveled a while, remember that what God’s on about in our lives is often something very different from what we’re on about, and in many cases something we can’t even see, because we don’t see the whole picture. What we think is the “A” plot of our lives right now might only really be a minor sub-plot, while God is at work telling a completely different story—and what is abject defeat in one might well be glorious victory in the other. Just as it was, as Tyler Dawn points out, for Joseph.