Invisibility.

My father and I are bikers.
Not Harley-Davidson bikers, no. Although I will admit that the idea of riding around, free as a bird, wearing leather and sweet bandanas is quite appealing, but alas, that reality has not come to pass. No. We are bicycle bikers. Like the kind with pedals.
Anyway, the cold is approaching real quick-like around here (which is fine by me, as you know, seeing that I love winter) so we have been taking every last opportunity to bike before the impending snow flies and before it both literally and figuratively stops us in our tracks.
Yesterday we were out toodling along through a great lovely forest when seemingly OUT OF NOWHERE this deer, antlers and all, comes charging out of the ditch, fleeing from us while carrying his fear that we were hunters and not harmless bikers.

Consequently, for the remainder of our ride we had our eyes peeled, waiting expectantly for another to come charging out. We would see them out in open fields here and there, but saw no more in the woods.

The thought occurred to me when I was almost home that even though we didn’t see any more in the woods doesn’t mean we didn’t see any more.
Yeah, I know I just said that twice.
And I meant to.
It wasn’t just me getting ahead of myself (or behind myself, whatever).
Another way of saying what I just said would be to say, “Even though we didn’t see any more in the woods doesn’t mean that there weren’t any there…it doesn’t mean that my eyes didn’t roam over them, it just means that I didn’t notice them.”

Why do you think we saw that first deer? Was it because he was there?

Or was it because he moved?
It was because he moved.
If he hadn’t moved then I wouldn’t have seen him either, like all of those other deer I probably saw but didn’t.
See, I don’t know when the last time was that you took a walk in the woods and I don’t know when the last time was when you saw a deer, but I see both quite frequently and one thing I know is that a deer’s fur is the exact same colors as the trunks of trees.
Like, the exact same color.

Have you ever seen those Bev Doolittle paintings?
Deer are like those.

Image thanks to Google.

Do you see the man and the eagles?

Yeah, that’s right.
Look it up.

So that’s what deer are like in the forest: there, but you can’t see them.
And as I was still peddling along, keeping my eyes on that forest, the thought crossed my mind, “Well this is like looking for the invisible.”
It reminds me of somebody else who was invisible, not because he wasn’t there, but because he didn’t show himself---and because nobody was looking for him.

Watch this clip from Sherlock Holmes. And I apologize in advance if the ad before it is raunchy. Sometimes they can be just totally…unforgivable.

But watch it all the way through….keep your eyes peeled all the way through.

Watch Here

Isn’t that hysterical?! I love it!!!

RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES. And absolutely seeing nothing. Like me and all those deer.

You of course know where I am going with this.

Colossians 1:15 says “He {Christ} is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.”

You know, a lot of non-Christians have a real issue that we Believers put all of our trust in something “invisible” or something “no one has ever seen.” And besides the fact that we don’t, for Christ came and therefore we see him(—we believe in One seen), and Romans 1 says that all nature proclaims the existence of God—so therefore they have seen him too (but they exchanged that knowledge…) and are therefore without excuse in not believing in him, etc. etc, they still think we are the “silly” ones.

We know this is not the case for another reason too. We believe that the Bible is true because it is (and has never been proven wrong, but I won’t get into that here), and this totally true Bible says that “The fool says in his heart there is no God,” so therefore we are not the ones to be pitied or thought less of intellectually, but onward they go sometimes, spewing their beliefs “like unreasoning animals” (Jude 10).
A favorite quote between a friend of mine and I that I sometimes want to say to those people is, “No, I am not saying that you are silly. But I am saying that someone in this conversation is silly….and it isn’t me.”
Ha.

Anywho. All that to say is people who don’t know the Lord think it is ridiculous for us to claim we know him because they don’t think he is there.
But really….I just think it’s ridiculous that they don’t see him.

Spiritual sight is a gift of the Holy Spirit, I understand that…but I want you to understand that, too. I don’t want any of you to ever feel wrong or strange or silly or dumb or like a loser because you DO see him.

And why do we see him, might I ask?
The same reason why we saw Sherlock Holmes and why I saw that deer the other night: Because He moved…and because at that point we were looking for him, whether we knew it or not.
I also don’t want you to feel like you are alone in your devotion to the Lord and in your “God-sightings” of him, as my mother would call them (We have “God-sightings” because those of us who are looking for him tend to see him moving a LOT---because he does move a lot). There are others of us who are seeing him, too.

Hebrews 11:27 says that Moses “…persevered because he saw him who is invisible.”

Isn’t that incredible!??! Moses kept going…to all of those meetings in front of Pharaoh…to the people of Israel to tell them they were going to leave Egypt…to the Red Sea while being chased…to parting the Red Sea…to crossing the Red Sea…to going into a new land…to wandering in the desert.

He kept going. He persevered in his faith.

Why?
Because he saw him who is invisible.

Doesn’t that give you a new zest to keep going?! To keep persevering, to keep telling the world the truth, to keep standing for what is right, to keep saying, “Sorry skeptics and critics, but you’re wrong about this one”…because if you have seen Christ, you have seen him who is invisible.

What a gift! Let us not take for granted the fact that God has chosen to reveal himself to us. Let us also not stop praying that all of our exclamations about the greatness of this God we see and all of our pointings of “Oh, did you see him do this?!?!?” really does show one of those critics, or one of those skeptics, or one of those current non-seers the truth that we see Something they don’t see, not because we are the silly dreamers, but because we believe in things we HAVE seen move. We believe even more so because the one we saw move is The Invisible One.