Finding God

I’ve been looking for God my whole life. As a priest, I guess you could say I’m now in the “God finding” business.

It’s not that I’m worried God is lost or that somehow God got away from us like an untethered balloon; it’s that I try to look for God in every situation, in every season, and I try to make sense of what I think God is up to in the world.

When covidtide started, one of the first things I thought was “Alright God, what are You up to?” I didn’t ask that question because I thought God caused this illness, but because I knew that God would be up to something in the middle of it all.

When I was younger, I saw God as a Zeus-like figure in the clouds, raining down blessings when the world was good and lighting bolts when the world was bad. But now I see a God who walks with creation, a God who desires relationship over control. This God works with whatever He’s given, even a pandemic.

One of the hardest things for me to learn has been that God doesn’t control everything. “God is love” (1 John 4:7), and control isn’t what love looks like. God could stop every bad or difficult thing from happening in the world, but that would make God a puppet master, not a Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. I know the Triune God is up to something in this season, even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.

But one thing I’ve learned, if nothing else, is that when I stop looking for God in a particular season, somehow God finds me. When I try too hard to make meaning out of a situation, when I try too hard to interject God into where I’m feeling God’s absence, it can end up feeling hollow and inauthentic. It’s only when I step back and let God show up on God’s own terms that I really see where God is.

This week that’s taken the form of me spending time in my new backyard, where Caitlin and I have been encountering all sorts of wildlife. As a friend recently told me, if you just look at nature right now, you would have no idea that there’s a pandemic. Creation is bursting with new life.

This has become embodied for me in our new backyard friend, an adolescent possum who recently struck out on his own. Seeing him scurry across our yard to catch unsuspecting bugs has been a joy for Caitlin and I (and a source of torment for our dog, Izzy). Seeing this little fellow has been a constant reminder for us that life is still happening, even when it feels like other aspects of our life have come to a standstill.

The thought this all gives me is this: what if humanity needed a time like this one? Maybe we needed time to take a breath and pay attention to the world around us. That’s not why this illness happened (because  there's no rhyme or reason to a pandemic) but it’s something that God is doing, in spite of it all.

My invitation to you this week is this: take some time to see what God is up to in the world. Look outside your window, go to a green place if you’re able. See the life that is all around us, even in the smallest of places. And then remember that we are part of a greater Ecosystem where we can always find God, and where God can always find us.


By The Rev. Will Berry
Associate Rector for Young Adults & Young Families