"God Sightings"

Dear WRC,

I first heard the term “God Sighting” during my first VBS here at WRC. While the term “sightings” conjured images for me of UFOs, yetis, and the Loch Ness Monster—none of which I was eager to equate to God—I immediately loved the idea. The curriculum created space every day for children and leaders to name where they saw God at work and to do so publicly in order to bear witness to it together. In a world where God is not only invisible but seems less and less “believable,” what could have a more profound impact on faith formation than practicing looking for God!?

I’m not sure what I was expecting from those VBS God Sightings, but I remember feeling disappointed. Someone gave thanks to God because they found their keys or cell phone. Someone else was nervous about something but it turned out in their favor. There weren’t many and they were all essentially just strokes of good luck. Was this what God had been reduced to? Helping us find the keys we’d misplaced? I’m sure God cares about such things and I don’t really believe in luck, but was this the best we had?

The more I thought, though, the more I wondered what it was I expected to hear. News of a miraculous healing after prayer and laying on of hands? Resurrection? The heavens being torn open and God audibly instructing someone to move to the other side of the world and serve the poor? I believe those are possible, but I also believe they are extraordinary and rare. Short of that, I had trouble imagining what it would mean to see God at work. And I think that is precisely the problem: a shrunken imagination.

 We believe God is at work everywhere. We’re starting a new series this summer through the Apostles’ Creed and we’re beginning by proclaiming: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” God made everything that is. God still orders and rules it. God is almighty. Yet for many of us God seems miles away and disconnected or irrelevant to our daily lives, if He’s there at all. What does it mean for God to be at work in the world and in our lives? How do we learn to see it? To live like it?

 Maybe this is letting the cat out of the bag a little bit, but that’s what I’m trying to do with these letters—one of the things anyway. I want to help build our collective imagination for what it means to believe in God. Each of these letters is something like a God Sighting. Maybe that sighting seems as banal as finding your keys (seriously, though, we lost a key to our Mazda and would love some help finding it. Nothing about finding it seems banal at this point), but I still want to look at it long enough to find the face of God in the stroke of good fortune and turn thanks and praise to the giver of all good gifts. Maybe the sighting is a growing sense of God’s presence in our life together. Maybe it is something grand and wonderful like a healing. Maybe it’s the grace of a killdeer. Whatever it is, big or small, I want to practice naming it God. I want to grow my imagination. I want to learn to see anew. I want to live in the world “charged with the grandeur of God,” as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said. Winn Collier writes, “To have a spiritual imagination is to have eyes to see God’s world for what it truly is: the ground where God fills the whole earth with his glory. When God fills the world, we discover every conversation and vocation and human endeavor to be a burning bush. Holiness everywhere. God everywhere.”

 That’s what I want to see every morning when I wake. Don’t you? I hope you do. If so, I hope these letters have been helpful practice, but I wonder how else we might practice together. I’d love to know what you think. Maybe someday you’ll even write back—these are letters after all!

 I’m grateful to do this work with you. May God open our eyes, dispel all darkness, and give us the grace to see Him everywhere, always.

In Christ,

Pastor Andy