Back in 2013, I wrote this to my mom:
Mom, I have thought about wanting to do this for a while. I want to take a picture every day of where I see God’s face. I want to look and find beauty, truth and love. Life is filled with so much and I choose to keep seeing the good. So every day I will look and send you a picture of where I see God’s face.
Here is one of my first (and favourite) messages sent to her on November 27, 2013:
Mom, today I saw the face of God in a man named Chico. He is a homeless man that lives on 35th street. I stopped and asked if he wanted food. I got him Subway. I asked his name and introduced myself. He said his sister had a daughter with my name.
He has a beautiful, kind face. But the special thing about Chico? He builds an amazing cardboard home every night. And then has to tear it down first thing in the morning. Only to do it again every single night. He picks just the right boxes. And tapes the sides together. On rainy nights he even puts a plastic cover on his cardboard construction.
I told him how impressed I was by what he created and asked him if he was tired of having to rebuild it with such care and attention each night. He wasn’t. In fact, he was grateful the owners let him stay at night near a heating duct. And because of Thanksgiving, the office would be closed so the owners told him he could leave his home up until Monday.
I saw God in his kind face and his wise words.
We build each day. And we can get torn down. All we can do is rebuild from scratch. Every day. Just like Chico.
As time passed I abandoned the practice. Life got busy. I moved back to my hometown and sending messages of my God sightings to my mother while we both lived in the same city felt silly. Or maybe I chose not to look so hard for God anymore.
But last week I had to go for an important appointment. Hospitals are not my favourite places. Particularly the last hospital to treat my father. As I walked toward that same hospital I did something I’ve never done before. I felt God’s hand and I walked with him. I don’t think I asked for him. He just showed up. It was so loving and reassuring.
I anticipated the doctor’s waiting room would be overrun as it had been two weeks prior. To calm my nerves, I decided to bring a book this time. I could have brought magazines or lighter fare – but true to my nature I went the intense route and chose Adventures in Solitude by David Grayson.
I guess somehow I knew there was something I needed in it. Or maybe I chose it because the book was in my Dad’s book collection and I wanted him with me.
I sat in the waiting room and I opened the book. I discovered I was holding a book that had been read by both my great-grandfather (a Minister) and my father (a librarian). The sticker from my great-grandfather’s library (circa 1938) was affixed to the inside cover and my father’s signature with ‘date read’ (circa 1963) was inscribed on the front page.
And so there I sat in the waiting room with God, my great-grandfather and my father. They all showed up in the blinding fluorescent lights of the General Hospital, Module P as I stumbled upon chapter V THE STARLING.
My dad would typically underline passages he deemed valuable horizontally in pen. Having my great-grandfather’s original bible – I know he preferred vertical pencil markings in the margins. So I immediately recognized the dark top-down pencil markings in the margins as my great-grandfather’s handiwork from almost 90 years ago:
“Wretch, are you not content with what you see daily? Have you anything better or greater to see than the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole earth, the sea?” [Marcus Aurelius]
It was true; it was true. I had been lying here these weeks, wretch that I was, consumed by own ills, allowing my own miserable past and my own anxious future to blot out the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole earth, the sea. I was not content with what I could see daily. The present moment, this burning instant of time, was all that I or any man could ever really possess or command – and I was allowing it to be ruined by anxieties that were of my own making. It had come to me, powerfully, that if I could be content at this moment, I could be content.
It was in the atmosphere of these reflections that I heard, in the early morning, the bird notes I have described, as they came to me through the open window. They came to me sweetly, thrillingly. “Have you anything,” I asked myself, “better or greater to see or to hear than this? Why not, man enjoy it? Can you not be content with what you see daily?”
I saw God’s face in the pencil markings of my ancestor in a musty old book discovered nearly a century later.
Happy Sunday. May God (or however you choose to name the Source Of All Things) be with you.
