Courtney Ellis

There was an incredible woman at my first pastorate who used to call me up out of the blue every few weeks or so.

“I just had to tell you what God did,” she would say. “It’s so exciting. I just had to tell you.”

Her name was Peg and she served our church as a Deacon and served pretty much everyone in town in one way or another. When our first son was born, Peg was one of the first people to visit. She came over and sat in our living room, holding him with tears in her eyes.

“He’s amazing,” she said. “Look what God did.”

Peg called her God encounters “God-breezes.” Such a beautiful way to describe the work and movement of the Holy Spirit in the world.

Her “God-breezes” weren’t often earth-shattering. She’d call about things like running into a long-lost friend in the supermarket check out line.

I’d often think, “Gee, that sounds more like a coincidence than a God thing.” Or even, “I guess you could see God at work in that moment, but you’d have to be really looking.”

Do you know what? I was wrong. Peg was right.

God is at work all the time, all around us, but often we are blind to his activity. It’s not because it’s impossible to see, but simply because our eyes are untrained.

We see good luck when it’s God’s providence.

We see hard work paying off when it’s God’s provision.

We see a friendly face at the grocery check-out when it’s God who sent that friend our way to encourage us.

Our eyes, my eyes, are untrained.

Ephesians 1 puts it this way:

¹⁸ I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people.

When we have enlightened eyes, vision sharpened and honed in our time with Jesus, we wake up to his hope and his calling.

So how do we do this?

Prayer, for one thing. Studying Scripture, for another. As we soak in the word of God and continually give our lives over to him, he will begin to open our eyes to a world of wonder and possibility we had not yet even imagined.

Peg died a few years ago, and as I stood at her graveside to give a final blessing, tears streaming down my face, a beautiful summer breeze blew in and rustled the pages of my Bible.

It would be just like God to honor Peg, the woman who saw him at work everywhere in “God-breezes” with a literal breath of wind at just the right moment.

Are your eyes open?