#349.1 – “Holes”

“Then the LORD opened Balaam's eyes, and he saw the Angel of the LORD standing in the way with His drawn sword in His hand; and he bowed his head and fell flat on his face.” - Numbers 22:31
The other day Sarah was going shopping and she wanted to dress up a little. She showed me a pair of shoes she was considering wearing, to see what I thought. She stood there before me - with the sandals on - and asked me if I noticed anything different between the two of them (now I have played this game long enough to know that that means this is not a question of whether there is a difference, but whether or not I can spot it!). So I looked intently at both shoes, determined to find what it was, and I could not see a thing there that screamed ‘big difference’; I couldn’t even find anything that looked like it was even mildly dissimilar. So I did what any normal husband would have done in that situation: I sort of grunted and shrugged my shoulders and looked stupid… I mean natural.
Frustrated at her husband’s lack of attention to detail, she pointed out the distinction between the shoes being the size of the hole above the toe created by the weave of the leather (or whatever the material was; for all I know, those shoes could have been made of paper; in my defense I would like to say that my normal level of perceptive abilities were thrown off by the almost blinding glare coming from my wife at that moment). One hole was the size of a dime; the other was the size of… well, a big dime.
And I had missed that stark disparity.
Sometimes in our Christian walk, we somehow get to a point where we are going along in our walk, but we are missing God. We are doing a lot of the things we do when we do ‘find’ and ‘have’ God, but we are still missing Him. I don’t know how much of that is because we become rather sure of the things which lead us to Him rather than on Him, or how much of it is because we assume we know best and that He will just go along with us because we’ve been right in the past, or what. But God sometimes has to come along and wake us up to the fact that we are totally missing the boat. His presence is staring us right in the face and we are missing it.
Father, forgive me for the times when I go along on cruise control and don’t see You in my day.

Daniel