Have you ever had a great sneeze in the early morning? Quite a unique and wonderful feeling, I must say. For over 40 years, I never acknowledged such a thing. But the other day, I couldn’t help but notice that the sneeze that had just coursed through me was quite remarkable. I’ve had sneezes that seemed to produce sparks in front of my eyes. As my family can tell you, I’ve sneezed embarrassingly loud at times, because of the funny turn of a head it creates in someone else as they stifle their unfiltered expression of “what in the heck was that?” But this recent morning, my sneeze was just amazingly sudden, strong, clean (fortunately)…and though the words start to thin out here, but it was also clear, clarifying even. For one half-second, everything in the world was amazingly clear and bright. …and then, of course, my body drafted back into itself the sleeping haze of waking up from which it was emerging just a few minutes before.
What is it like to see things clearly? As kids, our perhaps as teenagers, we thought we had such clear moments, or perspectives even. As adults, though, we realize that such times of clarity are surprisingly few and far between, if they really ever occur at all. But when we allow ourselves again this child-like possibility, we realize that we do long for is the ability to see clearly again. We wish we had a good sneeze to blow away the haze of our lives. I wish, for example, that I could see what is really going on in my life…as if there is something going on, beyond what is just happening. I wonder. I suppose. I ponder. I basically want to know that I haven’t just fallen, and can’t get up. Such desire on our parts as men and women of earth often dump us off to the larger and deeper questions that both enliven and terrify us. …and, I believe, they lead us to God. What is God doing anyway? What is he doing with me? Who is he, in the first place? How do I even know? And suddenly we are miles into another universe, away from what is a rather simple question about what the substance is of what is happening in my life…other than a few surprising sneezes here and there.
Ever notice that it seems rarely possible to make a great sneeze happen? I’m being a bit coy now on the sneeze analogy and soon it will break down altogether. But I suspect there is more than irony in this simply acknowledgment. We don’t make a great sneeze happen, it happens to us. And I wonder if there isn’t a clue here to the dilemma we often create for ourselves over the questions of God I mentioned earlier. God is not hostage to my verifiability of him, is he? How could he be? Verifiability, though perhaps always of perpetual interest to some throughout time, has likely only been deified in the recent centuries. But my experience with understanding and knowing God has almost exclusively been his revelation to me, not the other way around. Even as much as I don’t like the discomfort of this notion, it holds the water; it remains true. And, I suspect, because it does so, it seems to fit with the observably long train of historical faith in him on the part of believers. The very faith that has been handed down to me, that I believe in…despite our own collective inability to see God.
