The Telephoto Lens of the Serious Naturalist

Remember the husband who nearly got his scalp boiled off the top of his head? That is a man who seriously needs to “snap to” and look around. And if we are Christians who are seriously interested in getting answers to prayer, that’s what we need to do. Look around.

You’ll recall the verses I quoted earlier on this topic that associated praying with watching. Now would be a good time to look back and read those verses again. But I am going to do another thing, and possibly a bad thing by quoting an extra-Biblical source on the subject of noticing synchronicities.

As we discussed before, I believe synchronicity is real and that it can occur in Christian and non-Christian circumstances. There are synchronicities that come from God, there are synchronicities that come from the Devil, and there are minor ones all the time that do not have much significance except to let us know that Newtonian science is not the only explanation for how existence works.

Here is what Meg Lundstrom has to say about beginning to notice synchronicities (which can be possible answers to prayer).

http://www.flowpower.com/What%20is%20Synchronicity.htm

“Intuition, researchers have found, flourishes in a person who is open, receptive and nonjudgmental [in the sense of not insisting on a Newtonian view of existence]. Synchronicity has had little research -- it defies laboratory tests, of course -- but people who have studied the topic report a phenomena which Alan Vaughan, author of Incredible Coincidence: The Baffling World of Synchronicity (Ballantine) calls "the synchronicity of synchronicity." Just having an active interest in the matter seems to make synchronicities happen more often -- in part, of course, because we notice them more. [Italics mine.]

“Likewise, synchronicity too seems to be dampened by cynicism and doubt. Although some synchronistic events, like some intuitive hits, cannot be easily ignored, others are of a subtler nature -- almost dreamlike in their metaphorical patterns -- and it takes practice both to notice and decode them. [Italics mine.]

I’ll give you an example of my own experience of this.

A good while ago I had been reading in the gospels and gotten to the following:

Matt 19:7-9

7 They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away?

8 He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.

9 And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.

(KJV)

That remark about Moses caused me to wonder if what the Lord was saying was that Moses somehow changed the law given at Sinai to accommodate men. It put a question in my mind, but it was not something I was prepared to do a big study on, as I had other fish to fry at the time. So I asked it of the Lord as a prayer of asking:

Matt 7:7-8

7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:

8 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

(KJV)

And asking for wisdom is something that James enjoined:

James 1:5-8

5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

6 But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.

7 For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.

8 A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.

(KJV)

So this question went into my prayer notebook in one of the Rounds. It was not a hot prayer, but in the Rounds it came up once and a while. I started asking the question on 2/25/04. I asked it eleven times. And then around 3/22/04 or so I received an unexpected answer.

I was over my sister’s house to watch it while she and her family were on vacation. I happened to be flipping through the cable TV channels that she has and I don’t, when suddenly I happened onto an obscure local channel that was running a Bible study. The Bible study was about the differences between the law as given in Exodus, and the law as recapitulated by Moses in Deuteronomy.

Exodus is where God makes his visible appearance to the children of Israel as they get ready to make their wilderness journey to the promised land. He makes His visible appearance and audibly gives His law to Moses. Deuteronomy takes place when the children of Israel finally arrive at the threshold of the promise land and are about to go in. There is no visible appearance of God. Moses simply rehearses the law in their hearing.

And it turns out that the law concerning divorce occurs in Deuteronomy and but not in Exodus. Moses was the mediator of the covenant of the law. One of the jobs of a mediator in the forming of a contract is to smooth out the differences between the two parties. In God’s absence, Moses had the right to accommodate some parts of the law given at Sinai to the hardness of his fellow men’s hearts. Hence, Christ’s statement about Moses concerning divorce. This is one of the reasons that the apostle Paul said:

Rom 8:3-4

3 For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:

4 That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

(KJV)

In the new covenant of grace, Christ is the mediator. And so the writer of Hebrews says:

Heb 9:14-15

14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

15 And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament [covenant], that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance.

(KJV)

This piece of information was a completely gratuitous gift to me from God that satisfied my spiritual curiosity and saved me from having to spend time on a study that someone else had already done. And it was completely coincidental. Had I not been expecting an answer to my question at some time and place in the future, I doubt I would have halted my channel-surfing just when I did back then.

If you pray for something, and then refuse to expect an answer to it at some point in the future, you’ll just have buried your head in the sand when the answer does come.

So how do we make ourselves more alert to possible answers that God may give us in coincidental ways? The answer is that we can pray to be made more alert.

Here’s the metaprayer for this that I currently have in my daily:

“Sharpen my perception of You in my life. Cause me to truly see answered prayer at work.”

It’s the best telephoto lens I know of.