Seeing the Unseen
My dear friend called to check in with me a couple of days ago when I was very sick with the flu. How did she know to call me on that day when I needed a friend to pray with me the most? She did, because she was “Seeing the Unseen in 2017”. That was the slogan she and her husband had chosen for this year. Slogans aren’t new for us. We like to get a “word” that we desire to be our vision and motto for the year. In 2007, she and her husband, and myself and my husband, celebrated the new year in together. We all came up with this slogan “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven in 2007”. It was certainly befitting for the four of us that entire year.
I was telling my grandson and granddaughter (Braden & and his Ruth) my friends’ slogan “Seeing the unseen in 2017”. There are times, when in the natural, it seems like good luck, or coincidence or being-at-the-right-place-at-the-right-time when something good happens or comes our way. But for those of us who know, as children of God, nothing is just happenstance. We recognize our unseen God in our everyday of life.
We talked about how Braden had seen the hand of the unseen God when he thought he was getting ready to go into the Army’s Special Operations Training, but ended up, instead, going to firefighter and EMT training because a friend of Ruth’s brother — at the right place at the right time shared thoughts and ideas that inspired and directed Braden to move a different direction. He did, and became both. Coincidence or fate? No, seeing the Unseen.
Then, Ruth was working as a neonatal ICU nurse in Mississippi and one of her neonatal nurse friends moved with her husband to Gwinnett, GA for a period of time and worked in a hospital there as a neonatal ICU nurse. Eventually, she and her husband moved back to Mississippi. It just so happened that Gwinnett, GA (of all the places in the U.S. to go) was where Braden took his firefighting and EMT school, and at graduation, continued to work there. Ruth’s friend was able to refer Ruth at that hospital in Gwinnett and with Ruth’s abilities, skills AND “seeing the Unseen” now works there in Gwinnett at the same hospital. Happenstance or “seeing the Unseen”?
At dinner last night, we talked about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing where my Ryan was running that marathon and had just crossed the finished line. Shawntel was in the stands directly across from the first bomb that went off at the finish line. Both she and Ryan were unharmed. Seeing the Unseen. We talked further about the young woman, Roseann Sdoia, who lost her leg in that 2013 bombing, and the fireman, Michael Materia, a firefighter, who was the responder who took her to the hospital. They were strangers at the time, but he has rarely left her side since, and they’ll be married this year. Recognizing the hand of God — “seeing the Unseen”.
Like stories I’m sure that you can recall that you absolutely know that it wasn’t fate, good fortune, coincidence or luck — that there is no doubt the hands of God to have spared your life, given you that seemingly impossible, otherwise, job or home or spouse or other dream, if we could only but realize our Unseen God shows up for us when we least expect Him. Maybe we should turn that around and start looking for Him — perhaps there would be so many more instances of seeing Him in our everyday of life.
2 Corinthians 4:18 “We do not look for things that can be seen but for things that cannot be seen. For things that can be seen are temporary, but things that cannot be seen are eternal.”