Devotional – May 3, 2025

From Divine Reverberations: 

It’s Always Cloudy Except for When You Look Into the Past

Been looking forward to the future,

but my eyesight is going bad.

And this crystal ball…

Is always cloudy except for…

When you look into the past.

-Fall Out Boy, “Thnks fr th Mmrs”

I started these Divine Reverberations reflections a year and a half ago because I wanted to start paying attention to the reverberations of God’s work in my life. That is, I often feel the absence of God, the lack of divine speaking, and I wanted to be more attentive to the ways I might be missing what God is saying.

One thing I’ve learned from this effort is that God’s normal way of communicating is not in the present. We may be misled by the biblical stories at this point, thinking that God just showed up anytime to anyone and gave a crystal clear word. But the prophets and the patriarchs/matriarchs of the Bible were the exceptions to the rule. God didn’t show up and speak to anyone at anytime. 

In fact, the Bible’s editors, who lived hundreds (if not thousands) of years after the events of the Bible, compiled these stories for people who had not experienced God’s speaking. They did not intend to establish an expectation that God would speak to anyone; they intended to communicate that God spoke in the past, or that past events reveal something about the character of God. It is unlikely God will speak to us in the present in some unmediated way, but God has spoken, moved, acted in the past, and therein we learn wisdom for our present situation. In other words, the crystal ball is always cloudy except for when it looks into the past. 

God’s will and presence in my life are often only discernable in retrospect.

Ironically, though, this retrospect-understanding, requires much more attentiveness to the present. Being present in this moment enables me to look back with more clarity when this moment is in the past. 

I have never objectively experienced God in the present moment. But I can look back at the scope and trajectory of my life and see the fingerprints of God all over things. I can see the goodness of God in Israel’s story, in the traditions of the church, in my own traumatic childhood, in my conversion as a teenager, in my marriage, in getting fired, in the loss of my parents, and in the happen-chances of life. The crystal ball is always cloudy except for when it looks into the past. The past seems to be the most prominent way God speaks to us in the present.

Peace Be With You. – Paul