The Giver in the Gift

Here’s something I believe with all my heart: God is a speaking God. 

This morning a sparrow let me come near and look at it perched in the rushes. It didn’t move as I stepped closer, pushing the dewy grasses aside till I could see the sun glinting off its feathers. I stood in the mud of the little marsh and looked it in the eye. It held my gaze, never flinching, till its partner darted close and the two of them dove into the chokecherry bushes on the bank. 

The exchange took less than a minute. But it filled me with a sense of beauty and connection. I had been seen. I been noticed. 

It may sound odd to say, but God is in the sparrow’s eye. Not in some generalized filling of nature, blurring the lines between Creator and created, but particularly present and available to be noticed—to be acknowledged as the Giver behind all good things. 

George MacDonald said it well:

For the real good of every gift is essential first, that the giver be in the gift—as God always is, for He is love—and next, that the receiver know and receive the giver in the gift. Every gift of God is but a harbinger of His greatest and only sufficing gift—that of Himself. No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things.

from George MacDonald: An Anthology by C. S. Lewis

The pause before a bird lifts.
The smell of wild roses on the morning breeze.
The kitchen window spider masterfully crafting its web.

Gifts of creation, yes. Gifts from the Creator—here is the deeper joy. Recognizing the Giver’s wink re-enchants the world for me.

Too often I feel disconnected from God and his mystery. But I’ve found that one of the first steps back to connection is to remember this truth: the whole world is made to vibrate with his voice. 

The voice of God is not limited to the places and spaces we have deemed “spiritual,” cordoned off with scarlet ropes for Sundays or “reserved seating” for the professionally religious. 

Here’s the beautiful freedom: there is no separation. God is giving, speaking, loving, noticing, and generally flinging grace on any random Tuesday morning. This morning I caught it. I saw it, behind the sparrow’s eye, and it drew me in, like spider silk. The Giver in the gift. 

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~ Lindsey Gallant