Midnight Quills

Here’s a moment of realisation.

“With your own eyes you saw those great trials, those miraculous signs and great wonders. But to this day the LORD has not given youa  mind that understands or eyes that see or ears that hear.” ~ Deuteronomy 30:3-4

There are a great number of ‘Christian Cliches’ out there that people like to throw around – and I say throw around because quite often, I feel, they are statements that get said without really thinking of the meaning behind them. We sing in church lines like, ‘take all of me’ or ‘I give you my life’ and other things like that – but do we sing them with a conviction in our heart as to what they actually mean as a commitment?

The other side, though, of cliches, is that they become cliche for a reason. They just work. They are short statements that actually convey what a person is trying to say.

One other one that I’ve heard many a time is about the ‘scales falling from their eyes’ -  going back to Saul/Paul’s conversion and how ‘something like scales’ fell from his eyes.

This is basically used to describe that moment of realisation, of actually recognising God and his awesomeness.

It’s kind of like what’s going on here for the Israelites, too. Things that they may not have thought of, or had gotten to a point of taking it for granted, were pointed out to them as something to go, “wow” at. In forty years, their clothes didn’t wear out. They ate no bread and drank no wine. They won battles – and considering the fact that really, they probably had no military training, this too was something to be able to look at and realise that God had been taking care of them the whole time.

I did this so that you might know that I am the LORD your God. ~ Deuteronomy 29:6

I remember nice and clearly my own moment like this. My moment of ‘scales falling’ so to speak – when I came back to God last year and opened my heart and life to him again. I’d been going through a process of being drawn back in, I guess, and finally stood there and realised: I could not, and cannot deny God’s existence; and I could not, and cannot deny Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. At that point I realised, nothing else actually matters in the long run – if I cannot deny those things, then I have no choice but to accept the gift of love, grace and salvation that God gave to me.

What moments of clarity have there been in your life?