Where’s Waldo…er, God?

Published by christi on October 22, 2020October 22, 2020

As the okra plants reach the height their genes call for, they start to blossom and put out fruit on secondary branches, lower on the main stem. This makes the hunt for fruit like a Where’s Waldo puzzle. I can’t just reach for the top of the plant to snap off the tender pods, I must seek among and under the scratchy, splayed-hand leaves for the harvest I seek. Sometimes it takes three or four passes to find them all. Sometimes I don’t, and the result is a larger, tough pod that is on its way to producing viable seeds for next year’s crop. If I miss one, it’s not a tragic loss of needed food for my household, but it does send hormone-borne messages to the plant that it can stop producing since its job is done.

Sometimes seeing God in the everyday is like this.

It isn’t that He stops growing, or is reaching His maximum size in my life, but sometimes the life I live obscures His face or drowns out His “still, small voice.” This reference comes from the life of Elijah (of the Duel on Mount Carmel fame). After the stunning defeat of the idol Baal and the false prophets, knowing he had angered the evil queen Jezebel (who had murdered men for less), Elijah ran for his life for forty days, sustained by angel-food, all the way to the mountain where God had met with Moses hundreds of years before. There he was both comforted in his depression and loneliness, and confronted with the stunning power and love of God, but Elijah experiences His presence , not in the roaring wind, shaking or shattering stones, nor the sweeping brushfire, but in a quiet whisper. He needed to understand that his relationship with God was not on the basis of Elijah’s performance, but on the premise of God’s enduring faithfulness.

Not everything looks like God is caring for us, nor feels like He is seeing to our welfare, but sometimes our perceptions obstruct the reality. Sometimes the fruit I have already borne suggests (falsely) that there is no more I need God to do. Sometimes it’s my busyness; sometimes I have my eyes closed! Makes it hard to keep

Following Jesus every day in the everyday,

Christi

P.S. How is your “hunt” for God going? I’d love to hear and to pray for you!