Frederick Buechner on "Seeing God"

Somebody appears on your front stoop, speaking your name, say, and you go down to open the door to see what’s up.

Sometimes while it’s still raining, the sun comes out from behind the clouds, and suddenly arching across the gray sky, there is a rainbow, which people stop doing whatever they’re doing to look at… because what is happening up there is so marvelous they can’t help themselves.

Something like that, I think, is the way those 12 men plus Mary, Martha, Joanna, and all the other women and men were called to become a church. They saw the marvel of Him across the grayness of things ---- of their own lives, perhaps of life itself. They heard His voice calling their names and they went.


When we see the face of Christ, I believe it will be a face we recognize, because at some level of our being it is a face that we have always known, the way the birds of the air know from a distance of a thousand miles their nesting place. We will know Him when we see Him and, more crucial still, He will know us.”



Men and women of faith know they are strangers and exiles on the earth because somehow and somewhere along the line they have been given a glimpse of home. By grace, we see what we see. To have faith is to respond to what we see by longing for it the rest of our days, by looking to see it again and see it better. To lose faith is to stop looking.