Basking in the sunshine, a robin came and sat nearby me. He (she?) chirped periodically. So I was peacefully enjoying this display of spring. Then he moved. He lowered his head and took 2 steps backward and sat down. As I watched him, he opened his beak barely and I heard a small chirp of a different pitch coming from far to my right. At first I thought he was mime-ing the chirping of another bird, which seemed amazingly funny and I started to laugh. But as I watched longer, he opened his beak wider and wider and the chirping to my right became louder and louder. Eventually, my quick mind realized that something about his change of position was causing his chirp to echo off a far wall and not come down to me directly from him. It began to seem more and more weird.
So, when something seems weird to me, I immediately think of God. (ha! not that I think God is weird, but that He makes things so much different than we expect sometimes). And I asked Him if He was trying to tell me something in this weird little scene.
Immediately it came to me. We assess all of life based on our 5 senses; with most predominance on sight and sound. We struggle with Faith because it seems foreign to those senses, especially sight and sound. However, as this bird just displayed, how much faith we are placing in sight and sound; when facts are not always what we see or hear at all. How many games or pictures or diagrams have caused us to laugh when they turn out to be something completely different than we first saw or heard? And we take it for granted that there are optical illusions, but think about it very seldom. But rather we place ALL of our trust on those 2 senses so completely and will even get into arguments as a result.
We limit God to what we can understand with those senses, when in fact He is the one who created them and can manipulate them. For instance, a war was won in the Old Testament because God caused the enemy to "hear" the sound of a great, massive army coming towards them. So they ran away. The war was won because they ran away.
We go to God and ask for the solution to a situation, but at the same time while we are praying, we are envisioning God's response within the confined parameters of our own senses. We are limiting Him.
I read something recently about taking God out of the box. And the answers were amazing in themselves. But it came down to this. We can't think any differently through our own limitations. Our ability to take God out of the box can only come from us turning to Him to expand our thinking. If only He knows the extent that He is capable, then only He can comprehend that thought, and only He can share that kind of thinking with us. We can't concieve of it on our own.
So it's a matter of, "Ask and you shall recieve".
