Podcast 1.06 When God Plays Peek-A-Boo

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Transcript

Episode 6: When God Plays Peek-A-Boo

(Musical intro)

Intro: Welcome to the Encounter Jesus podcast, also known as the ‘feel like Jesus is hugging you today’ podcast. I’m Elizabeth Ellynshaw, and today we will be talking about one aspect of living all of life as a conversation with Jesus. We know that at any moment of any day, while we’re waiting in line at the store or looking for a parking space or stopped at a red light we can reach out to God and talk to Him and that is amazing, but even more amazing is that so can He. He can reach out to us and speak to us through our circumstances and in our thoughts in any moment of any day, too. I’ve heard some people call these moments, ‘God-sightings,’ and that reminds me of my family members who are bird-watchers and they love to climb a mountain where people watch for migrating hawks and all the bird watchers get really excited when there are hawk-sightings, and they zoom in on the hawk with binoculars and take pictures and write it down and tell others. Soaring hawks are awesome to get to see, and the God who invented hawks is even more awesome when we notice Him. Now I’ve heard some other people say they didn’t like to call the more dramatic moments ‘God-sightings’ because God is always with us and everything good we receive is from God all day long. And I think they’re kind of right, because a God-sighting is less like a hawk sighting and more like a parent playing peek-a-boo with a baby. The faithful parent is watching over their child all the time, but when the parent jumps out from behind a blanket or a door and says, ‘peek-a-boo!’ their baby squeals with surprise and delight over and over again. And I bet we’re like that for God. He’s always with us, and He’s meeting our needs all day long every day, usually without being thanked, but when He jumps out at us in a way that gets our attention, we get really excited, and He loves our joy.

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Prayer: Father, I come to You today and I ask You and invite You to play peek-a-boo with Your children. We thank You for always being with us, more faithfully than the most attentive parent in the world, and caring for us in all the ceaseless ways we don’t even realize and or ever thank You for. We also thank You for the moments that You jump out at us in unexpected ways and show us You are with us like a parent yelling ‘peek-a-boo’! Those moments with You are so precious to us. I pray for the person listening to this right now that You would remind them of how You have played loving Father peek-a-boo in their past and teach them to ever increasingly recognize it, and that You would keep doing it for all of us more and more. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Content: This is where I think everyone has their own love languages with God, and I hope you will discover what yours are . I met a guy once whose love language with God was finding pennies on the sidewalk. He would always notice them and the dates of the years on the penny combined with the time of day or date that he found it would remind him of the reference of a Bible verse he loved or the date of a holiday on the Hebrew calendar that was meaningful to him and he would notice of all these connections and be so encouraged. And when he shared this I realized, that is not my love language with God. Numbers are the last way I would hear from God, I’m all about words! But it only made me want to praise God all the more that He can show His love to my brother one way and to me another.

So I want to share some testimonies of times I noticed God playing peek-a-boo with me, and I hope they encourage you to notice your own, whether yours are at all like mine or very different. So God knows I wouldn’t notice if He sent me numbers on a penny on the sidewalk, so He likes to send me words written on things. For example, I remember once I was lying down in the back of the car on a long road trip with my friends, and I was thinking about a difficult situation I was in and how I had no idea how to solve this problem when I got home. Then I sat up, and I sat up at the exact moment that my friend was passing a truck, so all I could see filling my whole window was the side of that truck, which had an ad for a carpeting company that said in huge letters, “consider your problem already solved!”

And I received that, I said, OK, Lord, thank You that from Your end my problem is already solved, thank You for the solution, and I kept thanking Him that it was already solved and He did it. He brought the solution and resolved everything fully for me.

Or another time that one of my friends mysteriously and very painfully just pulled back and stopped speaking to me without explanation. One of her nicknames was Little Flower. And I was devastated and I kept asking God what did I do and how can I make it right, and all I kept hearing from God over and over in answer was that it wasn’t my fault and it had nothing to do with me and there was nothing I could do except wait. And I kept doubting this and asking Him again, is that really You are You sure I shouldn’t try to talk to her about it? And in my loneliness missing my friend I eagerly accepted when I got a dinner invitation from someone I had just met in another town, and they had these Asian drinking glasses with terribly translated English writing on them and we were laughing at how silly the writing on the glasses sounded in English. And then I suddenly realized that what it said was, “Right now is winter and the flower is sad, but spring will come and the flower will be happy again.” And I froze and realized, God brought me all the way out to this town to show me this drinking glass to tell me this message again about my friend Flower, I really need to believe Him. So I waited, painfully, through that winter of missing her, which was also literally winter, and again, He did it. My friend came back and said to me, I’m sorry I pulled back, it had nothing to do with you and it wasn’t your fault, it was about other things going on in my life, and I’m so glad you just waited patiently for me, that is what I needed from you. And so God confirmed again that I had been hearing Him right. “the flower was sad in winter, but spring came and made her happy again.”

Or another time I was helping international students get their visas and adjust at the university in my city. Three students were waiting to get their visas so they could buy their plane tickets and come, and I went to the university three times to check on the status of their visas, and there was no news. But on the campus of that university in late summer, there were thousands of roses of all different colors. So after being disappointed at the office, I would go walking through the rose garden and pray. First I prayed that the visas would be granted and the students would be able to come. Then I started to praise God for His incredibly beautiful roses. I told Him how every single one of the thousands of roses I was passing was so uniquely beautiful it deserved to be admired and smelled and He deserved to be praised for it. And then I started to talk to Him about how the thousands of students were like the roses, each one His unique creation, and to pray that each one would know how precious they are just the way He made them and would bloom and flourish and come to know Him. And so it turned into this really special time with Jesus in the rose garden.

Well, then He answered the first prayer, and the students got their visas and came! So then I was running around with them helping them do a lot of errands and paperwork before they could start their classes. We were standing in a long line of students in the copy center to photocopy their passports, feeling bored and frustrated by our long wait. And then I saw the two girls in front of me in line were holding passports with the name of this incredibly closed country on them, the kind of country you never expect to meet someone from because nobody can get in to share the gospel there and they hardly ever let anyone out! I was amazed to be standing so close to them. I tried to talk to them, but they didn’t seem to understand any language I could speak. So I decided , well, as long as God has me standing next to them in this line, I am going to pray for them! I started praying up a storm under my breath, blessing them to know how much He loved them and asking that they would somehow get to hear His good news and be saved while they were studying there.

And then one of them turned so I could see her t-shirt, and it had a picture of a rose on it, and written on it in English,

“You are my beloved rose.”

It was such a confirmation to me that I was hearing and agreeing with God in prayer and He was hearing and agreeing with me too. And Prayer like that, an intimate dialogue with Jesus throughout all of life, is again, never boring!

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Question: Today I invite you to ask the Lord to bring to mind a time in your life that He was playing peek-a-boo with you, and remember it. What did He do? How did you respond to Him? What happened afterwards? And then I invite you to keep a look out for what He is doing and saying and how He wants to surprise and reassure you again, in both big ways and small ones!

(Musical Outro)