Does God Have Eyes? Does God Roll Them?

I can tell you where I was when the Challenger exploded and the Berlin Wall fell. On 9/11, or during Hurricane Katrina. But last March, none of us knew how far or wide the pandemic would bloom, like spilled ink on tracing paper. Only now, looking back, can I tell you the moment I realized the pandemic had arrived.

A Saturday morning, one year ago this weekend, I met my friend for crispy porridge and coffee. We’d heard about the nursing home with a few Covid positive patients in Kirkland, just over the lake from Seattle. Sitting down, I told her, “I think this is the last time I’m going to meet someone inside a public place for a long time.” We hugged goodbye. I wouldn’t touch another person outside of my family for a year.

Things have happened to many of us this year that we never thought would happen.

But this year, some of the best things in my life have also happened, and I haven’t known what to do with them. Have you felt that, too? Some abundance in scarcity?

These good things are a string of red buoys, bobbing in an icy sea.

What is a good thing that happened in your life this year? Stop and think of just one now.

At other times this year, like a lot of us, the best I could do was hold onto the buoy and dead man float.

Spiritual buoys buy us a little time to be mindful. Eat an apple, think about the apple. The bitter skin and sweet flesh. Say a prayer, think about the prayer. Even if it’s just the word “help.” Read scripture, and think about it in a new way.

For me this week, the verse was from Matthew 9: "Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” I’d heard it a million times. But then I reframed it. If my kid asks for bread, I might tell him to wait, we’re about to eat dinner. Or to have a little piece now, and a little piece later.

I think about what it must be like for God, listening to our prayers. Every day, for the same things. How many times have I asked for healing for this person, that person, or myself? How many times as a teenager did I pine after a boy, praying to be noticed?

Does God have eyes? Does God roll them?

While sitting with the verse in Matthew, I realized that the bread might not come when we’re hungry for it. That hollow ache — our unmet longings — may not be fed until after the grave. Sometimes, the diagnosis is not curable. Sometimes, we lose more than we gain back.

No matter where you are today—joyful or in fresh grief, checked out or at rest, there are things that remain true. One of those things is God’s nearness. Another is God’s goodness. God’s goodness is a yeast that eats sugar and creates more goodness. It’s the kind of reproduction we need.

No more virus cells. No more violent insurrectionists. No more Black brothers and sisters killed after buying sweet tea.

“If we are honest,” Oswald Chambers says, “we will admit that we never have misgivings or doubts about ourselves, because we know exactly what we are capable or incapable of doing. But we do have misgivings about Jesus.”

Maybe we want the bread, and we want it now. I know I do. Instead, radical trust builds when we wait for God’s hidden goodness: a violent spread of blooms, well ahead of Spring. The kind of love that lifts, and seems absurd to believe in unless you’re gracefully convinced it’s really real.