Little Signs

Faith gives us eyes to see the world differently, and there's something incredibly beautiful about that. 

But when we have eyes that see the world differently, we also see different things in the world. We realize it's not just the world that we're looking at, but all of these little reminders of God that we might have missed entirely. 

My faith has deepened a lot over the past several years, as a product of both my desperate need for God and His constant reassurance of His love for me. Quite honestly, the life I'm living right now is a miracle. There's no other way to explain it. 

But because of the way that my faith has sharpened, I'm seeing God in the world in ways that I probably would have missed a decade ago. 

For example, one year ago when we put our little dog down and my big girl, my best friend, my constant companion started to show signs of illness, a beautiful black and orange butterfly fluttered around us on a morning walk and then landed on the sidewalk just a few feet away and simply stayed there. I was able to walk right up on it and take a stunning up close photograph. 

A week or so later, my beautiful girl died. Since that time, my life has been filled with beautiful, mostly black and orange, butterflies. I can't tell you how many butterflies I've seen in my 40 years of life, even with a butterfly garden that I planted as a child, but I can tell you that the number I've seen in the last year far exceeds my lifetime total up to that point. Actually, until that day on the sidewalk, I couldn't tell you the last time I saw a butterfly ever. 

Now, they're everywhere. 

When I was unemployed and underemployed for a long time, my beautiful girl and I went through a season where we found money on the ground all the time when we were out walking. And I'm not talking pennies - we found $20 bills. $10 bills. I remember one time I was browsing for new window blinds for the one window in my bedroom, but I knew I'd never be able to afford them on my scant income. I was looking anyway. And when I finally accepted that I wouldn't be able to change my color scheme, there was $25 on the ground. Just a couple of days later. All I'd have to cover was the tax. 

After I got a real job with a livable wage, we stopped finding money so much. A few dollars here and there, but nothing like we had found in my time of greatest financial need. And then...less than a week before she died, we cut down an alley to avoid a busier street that always kind of scared her, and especially more since she had gone blind, and wouldn't you know it? A $10 bill. Just laying there. 

This week, as I'm kind of just taking a breath and letting things settle and thinking about how I really want this season to develop and wondering about the answers that might still be coming to prayers I have prayed for a long time, I got the updated sticker for my license plate in the mail. No big deal. Whatever. Bureaucracy. 

But when I opened the envelope, my heart swelled. A sense of peace settled over me. I smiled. I laughed. I almost cried. The sticker this year is mint green. It's the color I've been surrounding myself with because it speaks something to the deepest part of me in this rough season. The interior of my car is mint green. Now, my sticker matches it. 

Everyone else probably opened that envelope this year and didn't even notice what color it was. If they did, they probably just shrugged - the sticker is green this year. Cool. Whatever. 

I opened that envelope, and I got a surge of holy strength in me that I didn't expect but could not deny. It just took my breath away. 

These are the kinds of things you see, the kinds of moments you engage on a level you can't quite explain, when you have eyes of faith that see the world...and see God in it....