Excerpts from God is Closer Than You Think, Chapter 2: Where's Waldo? by John Ortberg
"On Michelangelo's ceiling, all Adam has to do is lift a finger and he can touch the hand of God. God is that close. This is the teaching of Scripture...Yet it's not that simple--not for me, anyways...Sometimes I lift a finger; sometimes I really do try, but not much seems to happen." p. 30
"God has various ways of drawing us to Him, but sometimes He hides Himself." Quote by Brother Lawrence p. 32
In the Where's Waldo books, the first pages are relatively easy to find Waldo. Usually he is in a crowd of cave-men while he is wearing his usual red and white striped shirt, so he stands out a bit. But as you move on to the next pages, it gets harder and hard to find him, like when he is among the giants and he is so small. And then it gets the hardest when there are all the imitators of Waldo. Ortberg uses the concept of Where's Waldo for the "Waldo Factor", and this includes the rainbow days and how God hides Himself.
Rainbow Days
Ortberg explains in this chapter that we have, what he calls, Rainbow Days. These are the days where God's presence is easy to see. For example, when Danika was born, that was a clear Rainbow Day. Those days are such miracles that I cannot help but feel His presence wrap around me. Ortberg says, "On rainbow days, God's presence is hard to miss. On rainbow days the veil that separates the natural from the supernatural gets pretty thin" (p. 33). These are days where you cannot believe that life has happened by chance. But he continues to remind us that rainbow days are easy to take for granted or even assume that they will go on forever.
"People who are wise learn to treasure rainbow days as gifts. They store then up to remember on days when God seems more elusive. One of the dangers of this, however, is that we may start to think we have earned them, that they are a reflection of our spiritual maturity." p. 34-35
"St. John of the Cross wrote that often when someone first becomes a Christian, God fills them with a desire to seek him: They want to read Scripture, they are eager to pray, they are filled with a desire to serve. These characteristics are, in a sense, gifts from God to get them moving; a kind of spiritual starter kit. After a while, John of the Cross said, this initial eagerness wears off. God takes away the props so that we can begin to grow true devotion that is strong enough to carry on even when unaided by emotions." p. 35
Spiritual Hibernation
Ortberg next discusses the danger of Spiritual Hibernation. He says, "Spiritual hibernation is in some ways more dangerous than spiritual depravity because it can be so subtle, so gradual. Mostly, it involves a failure to see." p. 37
Sometimes it is hard because we wish we had the audible voice of God, the rainbow, dreams and epiphanies. But Ortberg makes a very good point. He suggests that maybe God wants us to learn to see Him in the ordinary ways rather than being so dependant on the extraordinary. He compares it to a mother inadvertently training her child to listen to her only when she raises her voice. p. 38
In the book "The Prince of Tides", the narrator says this, "...I would like to have seen the whole world with eyes incapable of anything but wonder, and with a tongue fluent only in praise." p. 38 Perhaps our non-rainbow days are really just days to teach us to have eyes of wonder and tongues of praise. William Barry writes, "Whether we are aware of it or not, at every moment of our existence we are encountering God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who is trying to catch our attention, trying to draw us into a reciprocal conscious relationship." Ortberg suggests that our capacity to pay attention to God only gets stronger when it is exercised. p. 39
So how do we exercise seeing God in the ordinary? Ortberg suggests a process of going through your day in its entirety and trying to think of what God was trying to say to you at that moment. He says, "Start with the moment when you woke up in the morning. God was present, waking you up, giving you a mini-resurrection. What were your first thoughts?...The more often I review, the better I get at recognizing Him in 'real time'." p. 39
There was something that hit me really hard in this chapter. It wasn't exactly a pleasant thought, but sometimes those are very important. "Any time we choose to do wrong or to withhold from doing right, we choose hiddenness as well. It may be that out of all the prayers that are ever spoken, the most common one--the quietest one, the one that we least acknowledge making--is simply this: Don't look at me, God." p. 40
What is scary about spiritual hibernation is that subtle transition into it. It can start small and then you get to the point where sinning isn't that much of a big deal anymore. And then it seems to me that you get to a point where instead of silently praying "don't look at me, God", we just skip it and don't care. I think sometimes we use the forgiveness card in our minds about sin too much. I know from my own experience during a "spiritual hibernation" that I got to the point where I even thought, I know that God will forgive me, so go ahead and sin anyways. I hate it that I got to that point. Thank God that He had broken me and has been rebuilding me.
Sometimes God seems like Waldo on that last page of the book, where it seems impossible to find him, no matter how hard or long you look. It is those times when God seems insanely silent and gone. Ortberg says that we have times for "the good of not knowing". At first this was confusing to me, but as he explains it it comes a little more clear. As humans, we do not know the outcome of our lives. Only God does. And sometimes we have moments or passages in life where we do know a fair amount of what will come. But for those "uncertain periods", we have an opportunity for growth. "It is somehow essential to human life as God has ordained it that we can know the final score of yesterday but not tomorrow. It doesn't mean we're condemned to anxiety." p. 45 Ortberg quotes a few men to help make his point. Thomas Merton said that if you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God that you have found. Brother Lawrence said, "It seemed that everything--even God--was against me and that only faith was on my side." p. 46
The subtlety of God gives us the capacity of choice. We would never have that much choice if we had the obvious presence of His infinite power. He gives the example of how people driving behind (or even around) police cars do not speed, not necessarily because they know that speeding is against the law, but because they don't want to get in trouble.
"God wants to be known, but not in a way that overwhelms us, that takes away the possibility of love freely chosen. 'God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away,' said Meister Eckhard." p. 46
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