God’s appearances are never command performances.
Our ability to perceive Him is always a gift. He initiates those moments when, for no reason we can fathom, the veil that keeps us from seeing the unseen realm is pulled aside. The clouds lift from the mountain. Our perspective shifts, and we see things the way they really are. What seemed distant or theoretical seems suddenly real. Or we suddenly know something to be true that we could never even have imagined.
Has anything like that ever happened to you? You might not have seen a light or experienced a vision. But maybe you’ve had one of those moments when everything seems to come clear and you suddenly understand something in a whole new way. When you find yourself newly and intensely aware of God’s presence. When you are granted the gift of peering past the veil and you just know you’ve encountered the God who sees you. Something clicks in your mind and soul and spirit, and you suddenly think, Yes!
It’s called an epiphany moment. And if it has ever happened to you, you know what a true miracle it can be.
It happened to me about this time last year, while I was sitting in the car with my daughter Mackenzie.
Actually, the whole thing started several hours earlier, when I realized with a start that it was December 22 and I hadn’t even begun to prepare for Christmas.
This was not normal for me. I love Christmas, and I usually start my preparations early. But this year Christmas had sort of been pushed aside by a family wedding. And I suddenly realized I had only forty-eight hours to make Christmas happen—shopping, wrapping, cooking, everything. I was feeling like a failure before I even started.
That’s when Mackenzie called. “Mom, I’ve got to go to Target this morning. Do you have time to go with me?”
Yes! I thought. Perfect timing. I could take care of my to-do list and have some much-needed time with my firstborn. My efficient, get-it-done mode kicked in as I grabbed a large coffee, picked up my shopping list, and headed for Target with Mackenzie.
Would you believe I got all the shopping done in less than an hour? (That’s one upside of a limited budget.) I stuffed all my packages in the car, and we started for home, my mind already racing ahead to what I needed to do next.
But then, as we drove, I fell into a conversation with Mackenzie.
She shared with me some ideas she’d been writing about in her blog—thoughts about her experience of being an adult child from a divorced family, about taking responsibility for her life, and about the meaning of Christmas. Her insights were profound, thoughtful, seasoned with both pain and maturity. And by the time we pulled up in my driveway, time had stilled. All my concerns about shopping and cooking and making Christmas happen had faded.
“Mom,” Mackenzie said to me there in the car, “Christ came when we didn’t acknowledge Him, when we weren’t grateful, when we were blind to our need and determined to have our own way. He came when we didn’t think we needed Him. And Mom, I am learning that He still comes, no matter what. He comes to free us from the failure of our lives, from the broken promises that seem to define us. He says, ‘I saw you in your need. And I still see you. I am restoring all you thought was lost, all you have grieved and left behind. For with Me, all things are new.’”
I am fully convinced I experienced a miracle that morning through the life of my young adult daughter. With her words, with who she is, Mackenzie unwrapped my Christmas gift from the God who sees me. She helped me shift my perspective from anxiety over what needed to happen to peace over what God has done in all our lives.
“Well, we can take the tree down now, because Christmas has already happened,” I told Jerry when I walked into the house that day. Jerry smiled when I explained what had happened in the car. “Christmas is more than what hangs on that tree,” he said. “He hung on the tree. He is the gift.”
Jesus gave and still gives us the miracle of a perspective change. Right in the middle of the messiness of life, He still comes. He still reveals Himself to our longing eyes.
Adapted from The God Who Sees You, by Tammy Maltby (with Anne Christian Buchanan), coming in May 2012 from David C. Cook publishers. You can preorder now at Amazon.com
