The point of this paper is to demonstrate the ways God has moved in my life. I’m not sure I agree with writing a paper like this, for the seemingly paradoxical reason that I believe we don’t appreciate God enough. When we write papers about how He led us to find the right house just when our house was sold, or how He prompted us to get that scan that discovered the cancer just in time, we are minimizing his overall impact in our lives. Because every good thing comes from God. God has different ways of working. Sometimes the fireworks go off, the triumphant music plays and you really can’t help missing his involvement. But other times there is nothing to remind us of his presence, and we often forget. So when we write a paper, we think back, and remember the fireworks, and the music. We smile and think that this, this is God. We forget that this morning when we woke up we were breathing (!). We had eggs and bacon for breakfast (did you ever think about God as the inventor of bacon?), and our car (we have cars!) had plenty of gas, for the drive to work (a job!). Because of our wonderful breakfast, and because there were birds chirping happily outside our bedroom windows (who ordered the birds, do you know?), we go to work in a good mood. As a result, most of us were very productive. People forget that their spouses, their children, their pets, houses, cars, jobs, and meals come from God.

This winter I, along with my youth group, went to a marvelous youth retreat at my favorite camp. My mother drove my friends and me three hours, and we arrived safely. Because my mother was not an official chaperone she did not stay at the camp, but instead went to stay at my grandparent’s cottage nearby. The reason my mother was driving instead of my father was because my grandmother was dying of cancer. If my dad had been driving, he would have gone as a chaperone and stayed at the camp. He would not have discovered that the furnace at the cottage was broken, and because of this, the pipes would have frozen in the extreme cold that immediately followed the fixing of the furnace. The furnace was obviously not worth the death of my grandmother, but that is not the point. The point is that, even though a horrible thing was happening in my family and it might seem to some that nothing was going right, God tapped us on the shoulders and pointed to the furnace. “You might want to check that,” He said. The point is, God doesn’t “appear”. He doesn’t “take an interest”. Because how can you appear when you are already there? And how can you take something you already have? God is always there, even when all he is doing for you is keeping the right combination of gases filtering correctly through your lungs. Even if you can’t tell He is there, even when it seems He’s left, even though it appears that He has mislaid the plans for your life, even then, He makes the birds come and sing to you.

29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. Matthew 10:29-31