Beyond My Imagination

There I was, enjoying a breezy Summer Junior (it’s Florida, we don’t really have “Spring”) evening on my back porch. The sun was almost fully set, the bug zappers were keeping the mosquito population to a minimum, and I had my feet propped up after a long day. The neighborhood had fallen into that late-evening hush.

The quiet was broken violently as something dropped from my rooftop into a bushy tree that grows up close to the house on the porch side. Bolting upright to catch a glimpse, all I could see was a flash of fur as the intruder launched itself away from the tree, leaving its branches wildly swaying. We’ve had racoons traverse our rooftop in the past, but the oak tree they favored has been cut down since last year, and we haven’t seen any since. There is a healthy neighborhood population of stray cats, but none of them has any reason to be atop the roof, and their size isn’t consistent with the force of whatever had visited us.

I couldn’t come up with any answer to my speculations of what may have shattered the stillness of the evening.

Then, I read a local news social media account the next morning. It seems that a wildlife sanctuary had misplaced one of its monkeys! The monkey in question had been photographed on a rooftop two blocks from my home that day. A monkey leaping from my roof wasn’t even in my mental menu of what may have happened. How out of left field! How far beyond what I would have even considered as possible…even for Florida!

We’re limited like that, aren’t we? Our minds can only come up with options that fit a framework of our known experiences and expected variables. Yet our God has infinite creativity. His thoughts can consider events and outcomes that would leave us dumbfounded. That creativity – and the power to act on it – is turned toward us with compassion.

That crazy, impossible monkey on my roof led me to Isaiah 55.

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:6-11)

Our ever-creative Lord brought an unpredictable, unimaginable thing into my life – hurtling with force off of my roof, awakening my senses and my adrenaline responses – reminding me that He is capable of so much more than I ever consider. Inviting me to seek out His thoughts, to call on him for understanding, He used a monkey that was not mine to draw me to consider all that is His.
​
When the unexpected shows up in your life, may you be reminded to seek the One who is able to use all things to draw you back to Himself.