Looking in the mirror

One day, as a little six-year old girl and her grandfather were walking beside the lake, the child looked up at her grandfather. “Where is God?” she asked the old man.

Her grandfather turned towards his granddaughter. “Look in the water”, he said. “What do you see there?”

The child looked in the lake. “But all I can see is me!” she exclaimed to her grandfather. “And that is where I find God”, he told her. “Whenever I want to find God, I just look at you and there he is, looking at me through your eyes.”

We don’t need to go very far to find God. All we need to do is to love someone and to be loved in return. In that love we will find the God for whom we are all searching. Someone else once said that she didn’t need to ask for proof of God. She declared, “I know that there’s a God. He lives within my heart!”

Sometimes, however, we can discover God in the most unexpected places and at the most unexpected times. There is nothing that exists independently of God’s love. If we are looking for God, we can find him in anything and everything.

I remember nursing an elderly soldier, Colonel Dudgeon, blind in one eye, who was about to have a cataract operation in the days when that meant spending ten motionless days in bed, with a bandage over the affected eye. He lay there, waiting for the anaesthetist to visit him, and said, “I think I’m the luckiest man alive! God didn’t need to give me two hands, two arms, two legs, two kidneys, two lungs and two eyes, but he did! I’m a walking mass of spare parts! I think I’m the luckiest man alive!”


Lord, sometimes I can be blind to your presence in my life. Help me never to take another person for granted, or any part of your creation. Everybody and everything is telling me about you. Lord, let me look for you and find you in every moment of my life. Amen

God bless,
Sr. Janet