A Prayer to See God’s Goodness
By: Chelsey DeMatteis
“Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” Exodus 3:10
“Slow down, pull over, transmission overheating!” This message flashed across the screen of our car as we were 435 miles from home, 15 miles from our exit, on a very busy highway. My husband quickly pulled over to the side of the road as I nervously watched cars, trucks, and semis fly by our SUV causing the car to shake.
“Lord, are you kidding me!”, I said from the back seat with our son. My husband shut off the car, prayed, and grabbed the owner’s manual. He then did what the instructions said and we waited. I’m happy to say our vehicle did start and about 10 minutes later we were back on the road, obviously with a trip to an auto shop in the very near future!
A few hours later while unpacking and getting settled at our family lake house, I felt led to prayerfully thank the Lord for protecting us and getting us to our destination safely. I also realized while praying that in God’s goodness, He could’ve been using that “message of inconvenience” in the car to save us from a horrible accident or reroute us so we picked a closer exit where we wouldn’t hit a traffic jam.
I often find myself looking all around for God’s goodness, when all I really must do is look right in front of me. His goodness is packaged in all things, and as cliché as it sounds, His goodness is just as much the little things as the big things. It’s the breath in my lungs as my feet hit the floor in the mornings, it’s in the sweet encounters I have on my daily walk, and it’s most certainly in the smiling face of our little boy.
God’s goodness isn’t confined to the moments that feel grand, and it has become more meaningful to me since I realized this: His goodness is also in the unseen.
I believe the gifts in the unseen are one of the most overlooked parts of scripture. Ponder with me all God did in the unseen that only the prophets knew about. I think of the book of Exodus with all the conversations between Moses and the Lord. The Israelites didn’t know everything unfolding in these unseen conversations; all they could do was trust in the goodness of the One True God.
Look at this conversation between the Lord and Moses in Exodus 3:
“Then the Lord said, ‘I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.’” – Exodus 3:7-10 ESV
Brothers and sisters, God’s goodness is unfolding in the seen and unseen. In the big moments and also the mundane. In the convenient and inconvenient moments. We need only seek the Lord and His heart with eyes wide open to all He is doing. My prayer is that this encourages your heart as much as it did mine. I pray you to live aware of the goodness of God.
Lord, thank you for all you do out of your great love for us. I pray that my heart seeks you and desires to see your goodness in all of life’s circumstances. May I always trust in you even when I cannot see what you are doing. Help me more and more see your goodness right in front of me.
In Jesus’s name,
Amen.
