Seeing God

In so many ways we battle blindness.

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News

Hello, my word-loving friends! First, some fun news I received the other day: The Christ-Light won the bronze medal for “theology” in the 2025 Illumination Book Awards. I hope this brings the book to a few more readers who might otherwise not have noticed it. If you want a taste of what the book is about (or would like to share it with a friend), you can read the article “The God of Light,” which I wrote for Westminster Media last year.

“This is a remarkable book, a blend of good theology, extensive reflection, poetic insight, and incisive application.” — ROBERT LETHAM

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On Seeing God

I see him all in all, the lifing mind,
Or nowhere in the vacant miles and years.
— George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul

George MacDonald, Engraving. Photo credit: Encyclopaedia Britannica

My wife has always called me an “extremist.” She’s right. Whether it’s books or food or coffee or exercise, I’m either all-in or all-out. I’m either fire or ice; deluge or desert; lucid or legally blind. This is as true with physical and mental life as it is with spiritual. I can be ablaze with passion for truth or dim as faded ash.

But it’s comforting to know I’m not the only one. George MacDonald, one of my favorite writers, struggled with the same. Even in his later years, he would write of God:

I see him all in all, the lifing mind,
Or nowhere in the vacant miles and years.
A love he is that watches and that hears,
Or but a mist fumed up from minds of men,
Whose fear and hope reach out beyond their ken.

He either sees God everywhere, as a life-giving mind, or nowhere. Sometimes he’s convinced that God is a love “that watches and that hears,” and other times God seems like a mist spawned by people’s hopes and fears. He vacillates between lucidity and blindness, faith and fatigue, worship and weariness.

Can you identify? Whether you’re an extremist or not, I’m pretty sure you vacillate, because we all do. People aren’t as constant or consistent as they think. Given time, we all stand with MacDonald.

The Comfort

The great comfort of Scripture—and sound theology that emerges from it—is this: God is who he is regardless of what we think or feel. You and I may feel that God is nowhere in the vacant miles and years. But he is. He remains himself. And we may think he’s closer than a candle to its flame. He is. He remains himself.

We are the changing ones. We are the drifters. We are the blind seeking sight and going blind again. We’re always fighting to see or sense God. But ultimately, what matters most is not that we see God but that God sees us. And he does. He is the God of seeing. May that be a comfort to you this hour.

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Update

Thanks to those of you who were praying for me to finish up my next book. I submitted the manuscript to Christian Focus yesterday! Tentative title: Our Hope Is in Help: What Keeps Us from Asking for Help & How We Live by Leaning on God’s Word. Stay tuned!