God’s Fingerprints
Posted on Jul 25, 2023 by Jon Brudvig
In his book, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … and it’s all small stuff, Richard Carlson writes about the importance of perspective through the responses of two bricklayers.
When asked “What are you doing?” the first laborer complained that he was an underpaid bricklayer forced to earn a living by mindlessly placing bricks on top of one another.
Yet the response was very different when the same question was posed to another bricklayer. “I’m the luckiest person in the world,” she said. “I get to be part of important and beautiful pieces of architecture. I help turn simple pieces of brick into exquisite masterpieces.”
Both workers were right. Yet notice how their attitudes shaped their own lived experience and view of the world.
The purpose of Carlson’s story is to highlight the reality that we see in life what we want to see. If we search for ugliness, rest assured that we will find plenty of it. If we want to find fault with others, our careers, our congregation, or the world in general, we will find that too.
But the opposite is also true. If we condition ourselves to look for the extraordinary in the ordinary, we will see it. Like the bricklayer who sees cathedrals within the routine of her repetitive work, we can train ourselves to see and experience the extraordinary beauty of God’s handiwork all around us.
Our task, notes Rabbi Harold Kushner, is to look for holiness in what appear to be unholy situations. It is easy to see God’s beauty in a lavender-orange sunset, a baby’s smile, or in life’s celebratory moments. But can we also learn to encounter God in life’s seemingly ugly circumstances — while enduring difficult life lessons, in the aftermath of a family tragedy, or in the frustrating search for a permanent church home?
When we learn to look for God’s fingerprints our perspective changes. “When we remember that everything has God’s fingerprints on it, that alone makes it special,” writes Richard Carlson. Just because we can’t see the beauty in something does not mean that it is not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully enough.
In Christ’s Peace,
Pastor Jon