“…then the priest shall look, and if the leprous disease has covered all his body, he shall pronounce him clean of the disease; it has all turned white, and he is clean.” – Leviticus 13:13.

The above passage fascinates me with its almost paradoxical, unintuitive diagnosis. While the true reason for pronouncing a subject totally covered by leprosy to be ceremonially clean is beyond me, I find myself returning to the seemingly bizarro logic of Leviticus 13:13 to consider the way a thing changes when it goes from being a particular to a principle; from isolated to all-pervasive; from incidental to universal.

I’ve been helped by considering this peculiar purity law as a similarly counterintuitive metaphor for personal belief: if faith in God doesn’t cover everything, my belief is spotted with leprosy. 

If that sounds commendable, promise you won’t be shouting “Unclean!” before we’re done. Because to get to the point of seeing God personally working in everything, sometimes it means feeling like He is active in nothing.

God is in the Big Little Things

A difficult decision looms, and the Christian husband wants the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. Or perhaps a young family seeks a new church home, eager to plug into “the” congregation that God has for them. Any faithful Christian would be grateful for such an explicit encounter with God. 

And yet, are believers people whose God intervenes only in distinct life moments? Are God’s children to imagine His hand working only in the instances they consider significant? 

Seems a rather selective way to view a Creator Who fine-tunes even the natural lives of lilies and dandelions.

Maybe it’s a by-product of a worldview that pits “big” against “small”—that we’re quick to recognize the work of God only in life’s large-scale. (We’ll allow small, common occurrences to be admitted for consideration, too, but only if they have a demonstrably significant effect.)

“Large.” “Significant.” Words that lose meaning when propped up against the backdrops of “eternal” and “infinite.” 

The Infinite, Intimate

The constant, personal reality of the Infinite God either renders all other things miniscule and meaningless or else miniscule and unfathomably significant. It depends on what kind of God He is. 

In order for anything to be in reality—when that reality is determined by a God beyond space and time—it seems there are only three possibilities about the relationship of all things to this God: He either loves them, hates them, or has forgotten about them.

That last option is so boring that I’ll dismiss it out of hand; there’d be no point asking thoughtful questions in a universe unworthy of the Divine’s own thoughts. The middle option—that God hates everything—is unconvincing. Cruel though life may prove for its participants, too many sufferers discover unconquerable hope and invincible beauty within its shadows for me to concede that irresistible Hate governs all. 

In this reckoning, I’m left with Love—Love as all; Love in all. 

The activities of such a Divine Person must be so utterly pervasive and so intensely deliberate that my attempts to comprehensively define His works would fall so short as to be profanity. If I credit as “the work of God” only those occurrences that seem meaningful from my perspective, I’m belittling God’s activity, not elevating it. I may not privilege my perspective of God’s involvement if I am neglecting His intimate attention within all things. 

What I Don’t Need to Know

Is this perspective on the work of God depressing? To say that He is at work in everything—doesn’t that devalue His focused attention in our own lives? To reference very different source material than the book of Leviticus, in the words of Pixar’s not-so-super villain, Syndrome, nemesis of the Incredibles: “…when everyone’s super, no one will be.” 

That is to say: if God is working everywhere, isn’t that like saying that He’s working nowhere? (I warned you we would get to this point.)

In faith’s perplexities, I’m endlessly helped by the reality that God is Father. This eternal, Divine identity is immensely valuable when the earthly example of fatherhood is understood as analogous. 

I consider how little my own toddler really comprehends what I do. While she’s beginning to understand that Daddy is “at work” when I’m gone for the day, she has no idea what I really do, much less why I do it. And she doesn’t need to. 

As both my children grow, all this father’s heart cares about is that they know the love I have for them in all I do. Sometimes, that love will be manifestly evident: a wrapped birthday present with their name on it. Other times, the same love will be obscured by layers they can’t yet understand, like the time I spend at work instead of playing with them 24/7. In every instance, my love for them should never be absent from or contradictory to anything I do, even the things they’ll never know about. 

Do I need to know “why” God does what He does? Is it important to attach specific reasons to the troubling realities which He seems to allow? Couldn’t it be enough to affirm Who He is within it all? Outside the “from God/not from God”-compartmentalized reality is a world where nothing is which is outside of my Father’s love.

It’s only when every square inch of my reality is covered by Him—by Love—that my faith becomes pure. To insist instead on recognizing His work only in specific instances shows my faith to be unclean—isolated from Life. My exclusionary diagnoses of “God’s works” prove only to be eruptions of my polluted perspective until I let faith in His love cover my reality, head to toe.

Love as all; Love in all. 

I can’t hope to explain why we live in a world where there even is such a thing as leprosy. Yet, because there is a Love that refuses to leave a single inch of it all untouched, thank God I don’t have to.