Defining Moments (2)

Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?”  Exodus 3:13  NASB

Has sent me – Sometimes divine engineering isn’t apparent until long after the event.  Sometimes it shows up almost immediately—if you are looking, of course.  As I wrote about my defining moments yesterday, I happened to pick up my copy of Frederick Buechner’s book, The Remarkable Ordinary.  I have no idea why I would reach for this book when I was writing about the emotional extraordinary, but as it happened (a nice Hebrew word, qāreh, a planned accident – see Ruth 2:3), I opened to page 64 where I spotted my marginal note “Heschel.”  That led me to read the paragraph, trying to determine why I scribbled “Heschel” in the margin.  Commenting on what he calls “the subterranean presence of grace,” Buechner wrote about remembering:

“It gives us all a clue that to remember far enough, to remember deeply enough, is to remember God, it’s to remember Eden, to remember where you came from, and that through remembering you work your way back to some truth that is a liberating and healing truth.”[1]

I suspect that at the very moment I was remembering those defining moments, those times when my life changed direction for better or worse, at that moment, subterranean grace surfaced—just long enough for me to realize that if I had been looking with the right paradigm, I would have noticed God’s underhanded orchestration of the whole event.  Buechner’s words capture it better than mine:

“I discovered cracks in the ground of my life through which I was able to glimpse the subterranean, life-giving grace of God.”[2]

“ . . . the events of our lives are a kind of alphabet.  It’s a hard alphabet to decipher, because like the Hebrew alphabet, there are no vowels—you sort of have to fill it in, have to imagine what the vowels are, have to figure out where one word ends and another word starts.”[3]

My qāreh experience.  The book of Ruth is remarkable not only because of the enormously important practical display of ḥesed, but also because God is so conspicuously absent in the narrative.  We, of course, recognize after the fact that all of this was qāreh, planned accident, but had we been participants in the events, I doubt we’d have any more insight than Ruth, Boaz, or Naomi.  We need to remember this.  Life is alphabet soup.  You have to know what you’re looking for in order to sort it out.

Topical Index:  qāreh, planned accident, defining moments, Ruth 2:3, Exodus 3:13

WAIT:  Here is why we love Italy.  Piazza Santa Croce, Florence  CLICK

[1] Frederick Buechner  The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Your Life (Zondervan, 2017), p. 64

[2] Ibid., p. 67.

[3] Ibid., p. 94.