faith fridays: snow angels revisited

Last Friday, I wrote about snow angels. This Friday, I’m revisiting that subject. 

In the post, I’d recounted the story of how God came to my rescue one cold, snowy night after my van ended up in a snowbank, and how an “angel” in a big pickup with a rope arrived, seemingly out of nowhere, and how much that felt like a direct and urgent answer to the prayer I’d just uttered in a moment of worry and even fear. I talked about how I’d bawled all the way home as I allowed myself to realize how God had responded to me, how personal that had felt, how in awe I was of His love for me, how humbled by it.

I know not everyone would interpret that scene the same way. Let’s look at some possibilities.

Some would immediately get it, would sense with me that that was, in fact, God’s quick response to me, and that this person really was a sort of angel on earth, and I had every right to believe that.

Some might say, well, yeah, it was sort of God, but really, it was more just a man being nice as he passed and saw someone stranded.

Some would say it was total coincidence, but how nice. People do good things all the time. Lucky you!

There are times when I’ve read such “angel” accounts from others. When you’re on the outside, you’re more removed from the situation and you don’t experience it the same way. If you’ve had a similar experience that felt like God’s response, you might be more likely to trust that that is what the person experienced. But if not, you might question whether it really was a God moment.

I recognize that in the telling of a faith moment, readers and listeners won’t always feel what you’re trying to convey; it just might not be there. That’s why it’s faith. Faith requires both reason and emotion. It’s a lovely combination of each, and my reliance on this has made my life exponentially more meaningful than if I were only to look at things from the natural level.

But what made this a faith moment for me, and not just a moment of sheer luck or coincidence, is how I processed it from the inside. I looked at it through the eyes of faith. And I felt it through the heart of faith.

Natural things happen all the time. God created the world for us and yet He allows us to have our world. He set it in motion, but He doesn’t make us love Him, nor does he control each moment, even while holding it all in His hands.

So did God really send that person to help me? Or did I just get lucky?

Here’s what I think. I think God created that person, that God is in that person as God is in each of us. Whether it was a direct response to my prayer or a response to the heart stirrings of a man who was created in God’s image, either way, God gets all the credit. Because everything good comes from God. That I recognized it as a gift is where the faith entered in the most strongly. But it was already there, whether or not I would have seen it that way.

Faith…can’t always be explained. Words and thoughts fail. At some point, it must be experienced, it must be lived.

All we need to do to experience faith is orient ourselves toward God, to ask Him to give us the vision to see through the eyes of faith. If we do this enough, eventually, our eye-glass prescription will become much clearer.

Q4U: In one sentence, what is faith to you?