When I could not see God in life’s monotony, God called me to seek Him, gently nudging me to soften my eyes, to see beyond the obvious, to ask what else might be revealed in the repetitive scene of my life.Īs I took a closer look, God’s presence not only emerged from the midst of the messy scene it completely popped off the page. Second Chronicles 15:2b tells us, “If you seek him, he will be found by you …” And it’s true - once your eyes are accustomed to the search, God is everywhere. God is also gracious enough to allow us to see Him if we look. But God desires love and genuine relationship, not forced servitude. If we consider the stories of Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Elijah and Daniel (to name a few), we learn that if God appeared to us like He appeared to these long-ago believers, we would have no choice but to fall on our faces before Him and worship. He does not force His presence upon us in a way that leaves us no alternative but to worship. God is loving enough to allow us to choose Him. Jesus was so shockingly controversial in His claim to be God that He was crucified. Even when God walked the earth in the person of Jesus, God was not obvious. The open secret of Christianity is that, while God is accessible, God is not always obvious. How was I to keep hoping, believing and trusting when I was blind to Him? And how was I to teach my children to look and see God when I couldn’t even see Him myself? Instead, God came like the 3D image of the stereogram: obscured and unclear, despite how hard I looked. And in these years, I have gotten through desperate seasons where it seemed God was nowhere to be found.įeeling utterly abandoned, I begged God to come in obvious ways - to make my babies sleep, to heal my body, to transform my children into the picture of obedience (or at least grant me superhuman patience), to magically resolve the conflict in my church, to make four broken hours of sleep somehow sustain me like 10 uninterrupted ones. These were all things I was deeply thankful for but not daily thankful for. Pregnancy, kids, chores, work, laundry, meals, church - lather, rinse, repeat. Over the past several years, my life has been like the repeating, plain and unremarkable surface pattern of the stereogram. To this day, my eyes revolt when I look at a stereogram - my brain is loath to release the surface-level picture long enough for the hidden image to appear. I always struggled to see the obscured image, too fond of clarity to allow my eyes to soften, too impatient to wait for the hidden prize to pop off the page. When I was a child, I remember being slightly frustrated by how much my best friend loved stereograms.
For a long time Israel was without the true God, and without a teaching priest and without law, but when in their distress they turned to the LORD, the God of Israel, and sought him, he was found by them.” 2 Chronicles 15:2-4 (ESV)Ĭlose your eyes for a moment and envision a trick of the eyes - an abstract, patterned image that, when looked at just the right way, reveals a 3D image nestled amidst the pattern. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you.
“… The LORD is with you while you are with him.
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