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It was the other day that one clear trace of God’s mercy landed in the middle of my lap, straight out of Psalm 32, in which   David writes of this Eternal God who surrounds “me with shouts of deliverance” (verse 7). Imagine that! So pleased is God with his redemptive plan; so great is his redeeming love, that he cannot simply whisper it or allow it to be merely infered in life. He “shouts” it! Can you now not see nail-pierced hands cupping the Messiah’s mouth, making a mighty megaphone through which he boldly declares, “Freedom!”, “Deliverance!”, “Forgiveness!”, and “Safety!”? And better yet, with holy eyes cast our way, “Mine!”?

One of the advantages of taking a breather away from the oft-toilsome routine of life is that is allows you the opportunity to step back and look a bit more clearly at, well, everything. And within this determined glance at your world comes the chance to see what traces of God exist; those little pieces (and sometimes not so little pieces) that betray his presence and his purposes and his active participation. The spiritual writer Dallas Willard, in his terrific little book entitled Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God, reminds me of the esteemed Blaise Pascal’s words when he in his Pensees writes, “. . . considering how very likely it is that there exists something besides what I can see, I have tried to find out whether God has left any traces of himself.”

So it is I pause to evaluate what traces of himself God has scattered over my simple existence. Among the several things that immediately come to a vacation-liberated mind are two worth mentioning here.

First, at a time wherein Christa and I have been seeking great clarity regarding deep feelings of weariness and restlessness with the ministry to which we are so clearly called, and as a direct result of our own petitions for some word from the Father of Us, God has rained down upon us the words of 2 Corinthians 5, especially verse seven, which reminds us that “we walk by faith, not by sight.” Frankly, it is as if the Lord pulled us aside, looked us in the eyes, and reminded us that we cannot look at our realm the way in which fallen man looks at it. We must look at it through the eternal telescope that belongs to the Eternal God. This one trace of God–obvious though it ought to be–has swollen us with a refreshment that has been deeply needed by our little family.

Secondly, whether it is an extended family member engaging in a potentially new ministry opportunity, or one of our own dear ministry staff members at Scofield Memorial Church following God’s guiding hand toward a ministry responsibility elsewhere, the fingerprints of God are so clear for these that I cannot help but find myself chuckling at my own tendency to believe that God is watching, as the old Bette Midler song said, “from a distance.” If in these two ministry transition situations, of which I will certainly write more later, one cannot see whether God has left any traces of himself, then one is simply blind.

How about you? When you take the time to point look closely at the world in which you life, what traces of God do you see? How about you share that with me (us). I’d love to know.