training your eyes

today i had a great conversation with a thread concerning seeing GOD do things. this person, who is a great person, has recently expressed how he sometimes has doubts about GOD’s existence and wishes that he could see GOD do things “like everyone else.” well the discussion started off around welcoming him to the club of people with doubts. i have them and i know plenty of other people who do also. doubt doesn’t imply a lack of faith, sometimes it is a part of great faith. i know of people who never claim to have any doubts but i am not one of those people. if it wasn’t for those non-doubters i would probably suggest that doubt is necessary for faith. if there is no possibility of doubt then faith probably isn’t required.

anyhow we eventually got to the point of seeing GOD and i suggested what i usually recommend in such situations … start a daily journal of when you might have seen GOD or when you think you probably should have seen GOD.

“seeing” is something we have to train ourselves to do. it is true in all sorts of “seeing” situations. my sons can watch a skateboarding trick and tell me exactly how many spins the board has done, when all i see is a big blur. andy lickel (a.k.a. the fish whisper) can look at water and see fish all over the place when all i see is a bunch of greenish liquid. jim, my brother-n-law, sees numbers in a way that makes companies want to hire him; if i look at those same numbers i just get sleepy. clint barron can watch a state of the union address and tell me all sorts of political statements that were made and implied when all i am able to see is that the regular scheduled shows were pushed back. why is all this true? it’s because these people have trained themselves to see these things. they have focused their minds to the point that they are able to filter out certain elements and highlight others. due to their diligence and practice they “see” things that the rest of us just gloss over.

if we want to “see” GOD doing things we need to train our eyes to look for HIM. we need to spend some time during each of day considering where HE might have been, what HE might have been peeking behind, and what masks HE might have been wearing during our day. when we do this enough we will slowly train our eyes to “see” and we’ll probably be surprised at all the places we see GOD at work.

2 Replies to “training your eyes”

  1. i would completely agree brad if i was using it as an apologetic to convince someone to have faith in CHRIST. i’m not suggesting it as an argument for faith rather as a discipline for one voluntarily increasing one’s present faith.

    i can see your point because my post makes it look like this guy’s doubts and desires to see GOD were intimately connected. long story but in the conversation they weren’t. he (and i for that matter) would probably have doubts even if he was seeing GOD work every day. the doubt question was that he was worried that having doubts meant that he didn’t truly believe and he does believe and wants to believe even more.

    still, thanks for keeping me honest. 🙂

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