Eyes Up: 5 Days of Learning to Trust God’s Heart by Tracing His Hand Sample

A lot of the questions surrounding the goodness and character of God are ones that stem from what we believe about God and how we see God. "God, I don't see you here" is a sentiment we've all shared at one point or another.

But then, at some point, we realize that Jesus shows us who God is. He lets us see God. And at that moment, the scales of our eyes fall, giving us new sight, new vision, and new life. We couldn’t see before. But because of Jesus’ power to reveal God to us, we have new eyes.

I remember the first time I could see in this way. I remember when I first noticed God's clear hand over my life, even though I couldn’t pinpoint it before.

I was 22 years old, sitting in a Sunday service listening to the pastor share a message on the grace of God. I don't remember the sermon title, but I do remember one of the verses he was teaching from. It was Ephesians 2:4-7, and I wrote notes on my church bulletin right away. God gives a certain kind of grace that made all things new, not based on merit, but in love. And this grace is a gift that has the power to bring about beauty from ashes, life from death.

I spent many years wrestling with the tension of God's grace and goodness in my life. I would look back at my life and wonder, "Where were you when…." Where was grace in the chaos of my circumstances? This wasn't an easy question to answer until I began to understand what grace really means. For starters, God's grace flows from the essence of his being. That’s something that isn’t just true about Jesus, it’s true about God from the start of the Bible to the very end.

I believe we've missed seeing God in our lives because we've not known what it is we're looking for. But with new eyes given to us by Jesus to see, we can learn to spot the moments of grace weaved in and through our stories. Jesus opened our eyes to who He truly is, and once we see him clearly, well, we start seeing evidence of His work all over the place.

I imagine your story has similarities to mine. Bills paid when there was no money left in the account. Housing situations figured out when we had nowhere to go. New friendships out of nowhere when we were lonely. Fresh courage poured out when we were paralyzed by fear. Where is God? When Jesus gives us new eyes, we can see and say with confidence—He’s everywhere. His handprints are all over my story, and they are holding grace, grace, and more grace.

That’s what Jesus does. He’s God in the flesh, and he’s also an eye-opener. He is the gift of heaven to you and me, and when we are given the ability to truly see that gift, we can then see a million other gifts sprinkled all over our journey. God has been there. We just needed the gift of sight to see His fingerprints—the multitude of graces extended to us over the course of our life. And in Jesus, we are given just that.