Faith Is Recognizing The Subtle Signs Of God's Presence

It is a mystery why God does not make him-herself more obvious. We are not surprised when many other things are hidden from us, for we consider them of little or no importance. But not so, concerning God.

God is the most universal and important reality we have to deal with. Our well-being is bound up in having a right relationship with God. Yet, it is possible to live a lifetime without a conscious awareness of God.

If we will, we can explain it by human indifference or preoccupation with ourselves or other concerns. Yet God's unobtrusiveness seems in some ways even more challenging and puzzling to those who are not indifferent, those who believe in God and want, above all else, to know God and walk in God's light. But to them also, as well as to the irreligious and indifferent, God remains silent and aloof.

In the Bible are many expressions of hunger for God coupled with frustration and dismay at God's elusiveness. Job cries, "O that I knew where I might find Him." And Isaiah laments, "Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself."

The psalms are full of the cry of the pious heart for a God made more evident to not only the pious but to the scoffing unbeliever.

Why does God seem so reticent to reveal the light and truth for which our hearts cry out? We know that God is there to guide us, but we seldom have an intimate sense of being guided.

Instructions are not announced by voice or written in the sky or anywhere else for us to read.

We go our stumbling way, feeling that we are making it on our own. God remains in the shadows.

It is only when we look back that we discern that we have been led. It was Luther who said, "God has led me indeed, but like an old blind horse."

And although we profess to believe that all good and perfect gifts have come from God, we have to learn to cultivate the habit of giving thanks for those gifts. It doesn't come naturally.

If God were to sign every masterpiece of color in the sky, or have announced every song of the robin or lark, our senses might be awakened. But God hides under the business of daily life, content to let his/her eternal purpose be a byproduct of the temporal, and often trivial, purposes of human beings.

Religion says life is serious business, and yet in its essential nature, life seems so mundane.

We are called to serve God, and serve tables. We are called to life eternal, yet forced to spend most of our time working for the temporal.

What are we to make of the Divine elusiveness and reticence? Well, even if we make nothing of it at all, it is good to recognize that it is there. It is good to be reconciled to the mystery of God, so that it does not overthrow the faith we have. It is, after all, not new that God does not deal with us as we would always choose.

We must be content with the fact that in various ways, we get enough light, meet enough beauty and love in the world, and are led to enough worthy moments to carry us on. This assures us that however elusive, silent and anonymous God may seem, God is there.

It may be that the unobtrusiveness of God is essential to the first stage of our spiritual pilgrimage.

If we are to trust God, how is that possible without God's leaving enough scope for trust and by God's withholding the larger vision for which our hearts cry out?

If God desires our love simply for that love alone and not for what we can get from it, how can God receive it from us except to leave many of the richest gifts unidentified? Only a heart already attuned in some measure to God's spirit can discern the origin and underlying meaning of God's richest gifts.

Try to imagine what would happen if God became fully obvious to immature spirits. By being so pleasantly familiar, God would cease to have the status and quality of God at all - "Known God, no God." A God small enough to be fully understood would not be big enough to meet our needs.

On the other hand, God could be presented in such awful overwhelming divinity that we would be crushed and our personalities would have no room to grow. In God's infinite wisdom, God has done neither of these things. At one and the same time, God reveals and God hides.

At any moment, God may challenge or solemnize, search, or thrill the heart with a sense of divine presence through the finite and familiar objects and relationships of our daily lives. But then, God withdraws lest we be blinded by excessive light.

We are given only enough glimpses of God and the pattern that God is weaving to sustain our faith and make us yearn for that nearer presence and larger knowledge that is eternal life.