The Bush Was Always Burning
Divine Providence
There comes a season in life when coincidence starts to feel like too small a word.
A stranger says exactly what your tired soul needed to hear. A road closes, forcing a detour that changes everything. An old friend calls on the one day you were wondering if anyone still remembered your name. A verse you have read a hundred times suddenly reads you instead.
Maybe they are accidents.
Or maybe Heaven has a quieter vocabulary than we imagined.
The old rabbis believed there is no such thing as meaningless chance. They taught that not even a leaf falls beyond the Father’s notice. Catholics call it Divine Providence. Calvinists call it God’s sovereign will. They may debate how the clock works, but all three refuse to believe the Clockmaker ever walked away.
Scripture seems to whisper the same mystery.
Joseph looked back over betrayal, slavery, prison, and forgotten years and finally said, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”
Not God wasted it.
God meant it.
That is one of the most staggering sentences in the Bible.
It does not make evil good. It declares that evil never gets the final edit.
Providence is not believing that every flat tire, every diagnosis, every heartbreak was pleasant or painless. It is believing that none of them are beyond redemption. God is so relentlessly creative that He can weave even our rebellion, our grief, and other people’s failures into a story that still bends toward grace.
Perhaps that is why Paul could write that all things work together for good for those who love God. He did not say all things are good. Anyone who has buried a parent, watched a marriage collapse, or stood beside a hospital bed knows better than that.
He said God works.
That little verb changes everything.
Maybe the greatest miracle is not that God occasionally interrupts history.
Maybe it is that He quietly inhabits it.
Through conversations we almost skipped.
Through delayed flights.
Through unanswered prayers that later became answered wisdom.
Through ordinary Tuesdays that looked forgettable until years later.
We spend so much of life asking, “Was that a coincidence?”
Maybe the better question is, “Lord, what are You inviting me to notice?”
Faith is not seeing secret messages hidden behind every mailbox and traffic light.
Faith is walking through an ordinary world believing it is saturated with an extraordinary God.
The burning bush was not remarkable because God made a bush.
The bush became remarkable because Moses finally stopped long enough to notice God was already there.
Perhaps Divine Providence is less about God constantly shouting, and more about learning to hear His whisper beneath the ordinary noise of life.
Lift your bushel.
Pay attention.
The next interruption may not be interrupting your plans at all.
It may be Providence introducing Himself once again.
And perhaps, as the old rabbis always suspected, God is simply saying hello.
Boutwell Jones
redclaygospel.com
