Can You Smell It?

Another Daily Prompt from the summer:

Yesterday, as I stepped out of the side entrance at church, I was greeted with a surprise. No, it wasn’t a bouquet of fresh flowers, or a puppy, or even a baby left at the church’s threshold. It was rain. More specifically, it was a rainfall that had recently ended. As soon as I stepped out of the door, my thought process went something like: What? It’s wet; maybe the Meals on Wheels people dropped something; oh, it’s wet everywhere; I guess it rained; it wasn’t supposed to rain today was it?; wait, it definitely rained here!
This certainly does not serve as a shining example for my skills of deduction, since it took me a whole six thoughts to decide that yes, the moisture on the ground was definitely caused by a form of precipitation falling from the stratosphere.
What it does serve as is a point of interest: why on earth did I not recognize the obvious? I’ll tell you a secret: I only believed that it had rained once I took a breath in and smelled it. Yes, smelled it. My friends make fun of me because I claim (like any good New Englander) that you can smell snow coming. Maybe they would just make extraordinarily bad New Englanders, or perhaps I just have a superhuman sense of smell and a poor idea of what New Englanders can and cannot do. However, the fact remains that despite all the obvious evidence around me (mainly the fact that there was water all over the ground and its surrounding objects) I didn’t truly believe that it had rained until I smelled it and proved by different means that what I suspected was true.

It makes me wonder. How often do we not see God where He has clearly been?

Sometimes, God’s actions are like the rain on the ground; we see it, we know it’s there, we acknowledge it, but we don’t actually believe that it’s God until we prove it by a different means. People walking away from what should have been a deadly car accident, taking the job that led you to a certain special person, falling asleep in the middle of an all-nighter only to find that the majority of the test is on the one chapter you studied anyway—no matter how trivial it may seem, God is present. It’s just a matter of whether or not we recognize Him.

Do you recognize Him?

Can you smell it?