The Unseen
This morning I was up with my daughter wrapping my husband’s Christmas present. We were trying to get it finished whilst He was away on a work trip. Whilst she was sitting there lifting up her Dads present and checking it out, I spotted a little spider crawling across the table where the present had been. She had no idea of course, and I didn’t see the point of alerting her. I simply swiped it with a tissue and saved myself from having to hear a shattering scream that would turn my stomach upside down.
She will probably never know about that spider unless she one day decides to read my blogs. There are so many things that we do as parents like this. The multilayer of service to help support our kids that they just never see. You only really realise how much your parents did for you, behind the scenes, when you become a parent yourself. The way they sacrificed their own time and sleep to have a little bundle of joy. The way they sacrificially paid exorbitant fees for your education, health and future advancement. The list goes on.
It got me thinking about the number of things God must be doing for us, that we simply would have no awareness of. The times He saves us from bad situations that we didn’t even know was coming. The times He is orchestrating things in the background for our future. If we were ever able to have a birds-eye view of all that He is doing for our benefit, it would probably make us nauseous. And yet the unfair thing about all of this is the fact that we are often making judgements about God, His love and His nature based on the 5% we are aware of. And we are generally only aware of the things we see. Assuming that what we see registers into our conscious mind as God-incidence.
When I was growing up I definitely judged my parents love, commitment and trustworthiness on the 5% they did that I knew about. When I became an adult I realised there was a whole 95% that I just never saw. Or if I did, I didn’t acknowledge the significance of it.
I’m not really sure how you expand your perspective to see all that God is doing, when in some cases we may never be fully aware of all He is doing until we go to heaven. At the very least, I am thinking that I must be more open minded when I am going through something hard and expect that His reach is well beyond my situation. Just the sheer acknowledgement that He is doing more than I am aware of, might be all that I can do.
Either way, if we believe the word of God we know that our Father in heaven loves us unconditionally. Which stands to reason that He is loving us in ways we aren’t even aware of. And as much as is possible I want to be aware and respond to this love, even when I don’t know how it is being poured out on me.