I Just Don't See It

 

It did not appear that we were looking at anything.  But we were.

About one mile on the skinny little road through Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, people had parked on the gravel shoulder to view an old homestead.  But there was something else to see.

One by one, a crowd had convened, observing from a walking path, a large black bear out in the field eating blackberries.   The tall grasses, weeds and bushes mostly blocked our view, but the bear was there.  We could tell exactly where he was by the movement of the foliage as he passed through. The tall weeds waved. The bushes shook. And occasionally, his head popped up.

At one point when the bear suddenly came into sight, the man standing next to me spontaneously lifted our seven-year-old grandson up to his shoulders so that he would not miss the majesty of this moment, a black bear in the wild.  Afterwards, the man apologized.  “I should have asked your permission to do that, but I was just so excited.”

After watching for a while, a woman passed by.  “What is everyone looking at?”  she asked.  “A black bear,” I replied.   “I just don’t see it,” she remarked as she walked away, unimpressed.

Is that how we see prayer?  Is that how we view God?  “Move on.  Nothing to see here.”

It made me think about all the wonders of the Almighty we miss because we too are not praying or paying attention. Do we just explain away the unusual?  Are we not willing to wait and watch for Him?

But for You, O LORD, do I wait; it is You, O Lord my God, who will answer.  Psalm 38.15

Those who pray and wait always witness God’s response in one way or another. Most often in unexpected ways.  Always in His timing, never late, and not in ours. Always in His own ways, God reveals Himself to us.  It is not that we wait for God, but He is really waiting for us to catch up with Him or to be ready for what is ahead.

When we pray, we see differently because we acknowledge the Almighty.  We know that He is working.  When we pray, God does not set anything into motion.  He helps us to notice the music of the spheres already composed.  God invites us into deeper dimensions that are all around us.

Who among all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this?  Job 12. 9

When we pray, we recognize the evidence of God’s Presence among us.  The grasses wave.  The bushes move back and forth.  God may bring His response into full view – and we are amazed by it.  But whether we see a physical manifestation, the outcome, His unfolding or not, God is still here.  Do we ignore Him or just explain Him away? 

“I just don’t see it,” the woman dismissed what was right in front of her.

As I was running on that same nature loop, probably now a decade ago, rangers had stopped cars and people to let a mother bear and her cubs meander across the road. The group of spectators was silenced by the magnificence of this rare occasion, mesmerized by the scene.  A young man was standing next to me, his little red-headed five-year-old daughter on his shoulders.  ,

I imagine that all her life she had seen cartoons and story books, and people had told her about these furry animals.  But until she saw bears in person, they were only so many pictures and words. The little girl turned to me, wide-eyed.  “They’re real,” she exclaimed. 

I wanted to tell her, “So is God.” 

Our praying doesn’t prove God exists.  But our praying helps us to know that He is real.  Because God changes us by praying.  We don’t just believe in Him, we know Him, we see Him and His fingerprints all around us.  In prayer, God opens up the wonders even in what appears an ordinary day or a familiar field. 

Ascribe to the LORD the glory due His name… Psalm 29.2 

Whether the grasses wave, the bushes shake, or we see Him move, we know that He is here.  He is as real as He can be.  Prayer acknowledges His abiding.  

Even when it does not appear that we are looking at anything.  But we are.

You are the God who works wonders; You have made known Your might among the peoples.  Psalm 77. 14

Can you hear me now?

Out of the depths I cry to You, O LORD!  O Lord, hear my voice!  Let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!  Psalm 130. 1-2

God is listening.  It is not a matter of us waving our hands or shouting loud enough to get His attention, “Can you hear me now?”

I can remember my grandmother saying, “You don’t have to raise your voice.  I’m right here.”

Particularly in crisis, we suddenly want to hear from God.  We want to hear His voice now.  “Generally it is much more important to cultivate the quiet, inward space of a constant listening than to always be approaching God for specific direction,” notes Dallas Willard in his book Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God.

After all, praying is a conversation with God, not based on words draped in some kind of sacred vestments.  Praying is the lifeblood of our relationship. Not demanding God, “Talk to me!!”  He has been.  We are the ones who have muted Him, or blocked His voice with our noise-cancelling earphones.

Have we taken time to listen and pay attention to how God is speaking into our lives on a daily basis?  A loving relationship is based on talking together and listening.

We don’t have to wait until something goes wrong. It is not a matter of needing directions, but God nudging us in His direction.

Early 1900s speaker and pastor Frederick B. Meyer suggests, “Be still each day for a short time, sitting before God in meditation…”  That is how we learn not just to listen for God or to God, but how to pray.

Those quiet daily moments increase our desire to hear His voice, “when life is uneventful just as much as [we] want to hear it when [we] are facing trouble or big decisions…our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it,” Meyer said.

In daily conversation, we come to know and recognize His voice.  Wherever we may be.   “…before the LORD, where I will meet with you, to speak to you there.”  Exodus 29. 42   Listen to Me.

The focus of our praying is to be with Him, talk, and walk with Him through the ordinary parts of life that are never so ordinary.  His voice always with us, not just on special occasions, or for disastrous events, or because we messed up or procrastinated and maybe God can get me out of this quagmire.  Our conversations with God are not limited to 911 calls in the middle of crisis.  He leads us by the still waters, He makes us lie down in green pastures, He restores our souls.

And He surprises us by His Presence.

And he said, “Go out and stand on the mount before the LORD.” And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind.  And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake.  And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire.  And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.  And Elijah heard it…  1 Kings 19. 11-13

God speaks to us in ways we may not expect.

Can you hear Me now?

Hole In One

 [Today would have been my father's 102nd birthday.  In honor of him, I am posting a small true story about an incident in his childhood.  It reflects the kind of clever and inventive ways he approached life and navigated difficulties.]

 

Bobby grew up in a brick and grey concrete world called Brooklyn, the sooty streets shimmering with waves of heat in summer, slick as the Arctic in winter, and devoid of hope when the Great Depression descended like a train wreck.  They were poor before, but this new despair added even more water to the soup and rubbed bigger holes in the bottom of their shoes. 

His mom, dad and seven-year-old brother rented a walk-up apartment in a three-flat building so narrow that one large tree, two houses down, shaded all the backyards on the block. His mother was one of the fortunate ones.  She got up early every morning, put the soup pot on the back burner, and took the streetcar to work.  She taught public kindergarten, thirty kids in the morning and thirty more after lunch. Teaching was considered a solid job, but provided a meager paycheck only nine months of the year. His father loved to fix things, and in that broken world, there were always friends, family or strangers who struggled with life and needed his help.  They just couldn’t always pay him.

There was no money.  Life was hard.  And then harder still.  There was talk of sending the boys to live with their great aunt Albertina who lived above a noisy tavern.  The boys’ nightly prayers changed from “Now I lay me down to sleep” to “Please, dear God, anything but that.”

“There has to be an answer to these problems,” Bobby said to his mom.  “There always is. We just have to solve it.”

“Son, I know you love problems.  There is no one around like you who does math problems just for fun.  But this is your world,” his mom replied.  “This is where you live and breathe and have your being. Why do you always think you can do anything different? This won’t be the last time when your life is going to be hard.  Learn to live with it.”  His mom rolled her eyes and looked away.  His dad looked right at him and winked.

Bobby turned to his brother Donnie, now the only one left in the room, “We have to do something to make some money.” But there were no jobs for able-bodied men, even for his dad, let alone young boys with no skills.

A week later, yet on another day with nothing to do, Bobby stared out the cracked back window at their tiny bleak yard where weeds would not even grow. He watched his brother swinging a big stick that had blown out of the neighboring tree in a storm.  Donnie was hitting rocks on the ground with it.  With a regular drum beat, the rocks ricocheted off the tall wood fence.  A stick and a rock.  “That’s it,” Bobby said out loud. “Thank you, little brother.  We’re gonna be as rich as the Rockefellers.”

That night after their parents went to bed, and they could hear their dad snoring through the paper-thin walls, Bobby told Donnie his crazy plan to transform their yard into an elaborate putt-putt golf course for the neighborhood children to play. “You’re nuts,” his brother said.  “Do you know that?” 

And then, Donnie grinned his toothless smile.  “When do we start?”

There was no money to build it.  So, they scrounged through the garbage piled up in the alleys, found bricks and discarded wood where houses had been condemned, and scoured the dump for anything usable, tin cans, rusty nails, and once, two bent wheels from a broken baby carriage. The heap in the back yard grew.  Mom and Dad were either too busy to notice, or overjoyed that the boys were staying out of trouble. The way through the maze was not always obvious, and sometimes stuff didn’t fit together at all, but they tried out and dismantled dozens of designs and then went back to the drawing board again.

Over the space of many late nights, the pile of junk took shape like a piecemeal medieval castle with moats, ramps and secret passageways, a spectacular golf course of sorts, emerging from the rubble.

Word traveled fast.  The kids in the neighborhood began jostling each other in line, anxious to play.  But there was still no money.  The other children had no more cash than the boys did.  Yet as Bobby often surmised, every problem had a path through it.  He just had to find it, like the physics problems in his dad’s old textbook.

After another long and lean weekend, no answer in sight, Bobby and Donnie stood at the back door, overlooking their forlorn kingdom.  As it was Monday morning --laundry day-- the boys watched mothers and grandmothers clipping their weekly wash on the clotheslines zigzagged above the yards, sheets and colorful shirts flapping like national flags, vying for their attention.  The boys looked at each other.  “You’re nuts,” Donnie remarked.  And by noon, the boys were open for business.

All week, to the delight of the neighbor kids, even those as far away as Delancey Street, Bobby and Donnie charged the children just a few clothespins to play a round of golf, dropping them like gold coins, one by one into large cloth bags. 

And then, early every Monday morning, two young smiling boys went knocking door to door and sold clothespins to unsuspecting moms. 

Like hitting a hole in one, every week.