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GOD SIGHTINGS
When I was a kid, we lived in northeastern Louisiana. A little town called Dunn. According to the 1970 census, this vast metropolis was the home to 200 souls. I think that number must have included pigs, cows, chickens, dogs, and cats.
Anyway, one night after church we were walking home (the church was about ¼-mile down the road, so on nice evenings we sometimes walked). I looked up in the sky and saw little lights hovering above the horizon. As I watched, the lights began to change colors. Then they darted across the sky. Then they moved up and down. Then they were gone.
For several nights in a row after that this little (well, I was little then) 9-year old would go outside and look up, trying to see those lights again. Never did.
How easy is it to feel LOST in this world?
Light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second, so a light year is equal to about 5.86 trillion miles. If you could get your hot rod up to light speed, you could go around the earth 4 times --- IN ONE SECOND! IN one year, you could go around the world 240 million times! Scientists believe that the distant galaxies that we can see in the most powerful telescopes are around 10 billion light-years away.
According to the US Census Bureau, there are about 300 million people in the US and 6.5 billion on earth. How does God manage it all?!?!
God is powerful enough to be involved in the details of our lives. But, the good news is, He is also INTERESTED in doing so. He is big enough and powerful enough to encompass the 10 billion light-years of space that we know of. But He is also great enough to be intimately involved in every single one of the 6.5 billion people on earth.
Jesus says even the hairs on our heads are numbered, so obviously no detail is too small for God. Especially if you consider that, on average, we have 100,000 hairs on our heads. For 6.5 billion people worldwide, that would be 650 trillion hairs! Of course, someone out there has to have a few more than 100,000 since I seem to have a few less.
If God even knows our hair count, then He most certainly is involved in the everyday details of our lives, and the direction in which our lives are headed. We just need to learn how to recognize God’s involvement. But, our failure to recognize that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
As I began this blog I recounted a UFO sighting I had as a kid. Keep in mind I did not say it was a flying saucer full of space aliens, I said UFO—it was a flying object, but I did not know what kind of flying object it was. A flying object I could not identify--an unidentified flying object. U—F—O. A UFO sighting.
So, now, lets talk about “God sightings”. Evidences of God’s hand at work in our everyday life. Try this:
Corrie Ten Boom and her sister Betsie were prisoners in Ravensbruck, the notorious German prison, during WWII. Corrie tells about her experience there in her book The Hiding Place. Corrie was dismayed by the conditions, especially the fleas that infested their living quarters.
In response, her sister prayed and then claimed a passage from the Bible they had smuggled with them.
“That’s it, Corrie!” she said. “That’s His answer. ‘Give thanks in all circumstances!’ That’s what we can do. We can start right now to thank God for every single thing about this new barracks!”
And Betsie did just that, but when she thanked God for the fleas, Corrie objected.
“Betsie, there’s no way even God can make me grateful for a flea.”
It was only later that Corrie was able to see God’s hand in their flea-ridden situation. While in that barracks, Corrie and her sister were able to share God’s Word with the other women prisoners, without interruption from the guards.
Betsie explained why. “You know we’ve never understood why we had so much freedom in the big room,” she said to Corrie. “Well—I’ve found out.”
That day, there had been confusion about sock sizes, and the women had asked a supervisor to come and settle it. The supervisor refused, as did the guards. “And you know why…Because of the fleas!”
Or, how’s this for a “God sighting”:
Horatio Spafford was a successful lawyer and investor. In 1871, a horrible fire in Chicago spread throughout the city and burned most of Horatio’s investments and assets to the ground. Looking for respite and rejuvenation, Horatio sent his wife and four daughters across the ocean for a European vacation to relax and wait for him as he tied up some loose ends for his business. During the voyage, their ship was struck by another ship and sunk into the chilling November ocean. Horatio received a message from his wife: “Saved alone.”
Horatio sailed across the ocean to meet with his grieving wife. During the voyage, near the very spot where his daughters drowned, he wrote words to a hymn that acknowledged the pain in his life, but instead focused on the power of Jesus in the midst of the pain: “It Is Well With My Soul”.
FAILURE ISN’T FATAL
IT’S NOT MY FAULT!!! As it turns out, it all goes back to high school. I played basketball all four years. And our team was awful. For three years I don’t think we ever lost by less than 30 points. We got drummed regularly. I think the Florida High School Athletic Association is to blame. They didn’t enact any laws to keep me from being embarrassed. They should have suspended the coaches of the other teams for beating us so bad. Maybe it was my coach’s fault. And the administration of my high school. They believed the education was more important than the athletics. So, when we got creamed, they didn’t blame the coach. The coach told us to keep making our best efforts, he didn’t overreact to losing.
But, you know what happened? In our senior year we won. And won a lot. And won big a lot. But more importantly, we had learned to endure the difficulty and persevere through trouble. A great lesson indeed.
It amazes me to hear such stories as the recent decision in Connecticut to suspend football coaches whose teams win by more than 50 points. What are they to do, start taking a knee in the 3rd quarter? For myself, if the opposing basketball teams had been forced to start playing four people, or giving the ball back if they didn’t score in 10 seconds (which might not had helped, come to think about it), or some such stuff as that, it would have been far more embarrassing than just losing.
In the Bible we are told that God instructed His people to teach their kids what they needed to know, in that case His Laws. He told them that is was the most important thing they could do as a society, apart from following Him. Almost the entire book of Proverbs is dedicated to trying to impart wisdom to the next generation.
If we keep our kids from experiencing a little failure, we do them a grave disservice. Failure at an age and under circumstances where that failure is not irreversible is a good thing. If we let them fail, when it won’t really hut them in the grand scheme of things, we teach them how to handle adversity and ultimately instruct them on how to succeed.
I am afraid though, that the rush to “protect” kids is really more about our egos than their psyche. I fear it is parents who don’t want to be embarrassed by their kids losing. And I know it can be school and district administrators who don’t want to see the “biggest losers” in their schools. Having been a public school teacher I have seen that first-hand. Although you will almost never get them to admit it in public. Instead, they do what Connecticut has done. Namely, they make pronouncements for “the best of the students”.
God knew better than that. In the portions of scriptures that chronicle the week of Easter, what we call the Passion Narratives, God tells us about the failure of Peter and the other Apostles. He didn’t keep them form failure, or try to sweep it under the rug. We are told that Peter denied even knowing Jesus three times. And we are also told that all the disciples abandoned Jesus at some point or another. And, after the crucifixion, we know that they were all together, hiding behind closed doors.
But Jesus wouldn’t let the failure stand. He didn’t keep them from failing, but He did use it to make them into the men and women He needed them to be. Three times He put Peter on the spot, asking him if he loved Him. Then, once Peter had learned the lesson through the failure, God could use him to preach the Gospel and see thousands of people “saved” at one time. And, in the process, begin the Christian church.
Failure isn’t fatal.
Hey, I got a great idea. How ‘bout we begin letting kids be kids again? And in the process we can instruct them in the most important lessons of all. How to handle it when not everything works out our way.
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