I Asked, and God Gave Me a Sign
It started when I read the label, sitting with my foot propped beside me, at the kitchen table. I realized I’d been taking it all wrong—the strong antibiotic to kill the infection in my re-repaired Achilles tendon.
I took a pill each morning with yogurt, alone. “Do not take with milk or yogurt, alone” I now read, one week into a two-week-prescription. Soon, my wound care doctor would tell me that the wound closing over my tendon would be, I quote, “like grass growing on a rock.” This, in turn, made me realize how complicated my return to work this school year would be.
And over all these things, hung the fresh loss of a friend.
It was enough.
Hungry for Good News
Alone in my house, I cried out. With sobs and tears and a bandaged foot lifted high, I cried out,
“Oh God, would you please give me a sign of your goodness?”
I was echoing David in Psalm 86:17, though I couldn’t have told you the reference then,
“Give me a sign of your goodness, that my enemies may see it and be put to shame,
for you, LORD, have helped me and comforted me.”
David seems so hungry here for a some good news that he comes right out and asks,
“Lord, could you just give me some encouragement, just a little evidence of your care? Because I am in a tight spot.’
In a Tight Spot
David was, and I am, in a tight spot.
“Tight spot” was the exact phrase I chose to sum up my situation. A few days before I cried out, my surgeon had just explained how he’d need to pull the culprit suture, the one harboring nasty bacteria in my twice ruptured, twice repaired Achilles tendon.
If he did not operate again, the infection would continue to recur again and again. But if he did pull the suture, my tender tendon would be more likely to rupture again. Oh, and this antibiotic I’m on increases the risk for tendon ruptures, and my wound has not closed.
“So I’m in a tight spot,” I concluded.
“We,” he said, softly after the slightest pause, “are in a tight spot.”
Maybe you’re in this tight spot too—where you just want a little encouragement, an assurance from God that he cares and hears your prayers.
Could you use just a little encouragement, a little refuel for the fight?
Maybe you could really use a sign of God’s goodness.
Tokens of a Truth
The 19th-century Scottish pastor Alexander MacLaren noted that requesting “a sign” does not necessarily mean asking for a miracle. A clear sign of God’s favor, “might be as unmistakably shown by an every-day event as by a supernatural intervention.”
God honors this sort of request. Not always, and not only as in Psalm 86, where the sign proved to the enemies that God was with his servant David, but God answers this prayer—if even to strengthen our discouraged hearts.
God answers this sort of prayer—if even to strengthen our faint, discouraged hearts.
“God is good to those who truly need this,” theologian Derek Kidner wrote, citing Gideon’s request for a sign of his presence (Judges 6:17 ff). God granted Gideon’s request over and over and over, in supernatural fire from the rock and on the fleece and the barley loaf dream.
But we take Psalm 86 specifically, signs, or tokens, of God’s goodness might include:
- Answers to prayer (Psalm 86:1, Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me).
- Deliverance from trouble (Psalm 86:2, Save Your servant who trusts in you).
- Joy in trouble (Psalm 86:4, Gladden the soul of your servant).
- Awareness of forgiveness (Psalm 86:5, For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving).
- Strength in weakness (Psalm 86:16, Give your strength to your servant).
Whether you consider these signs more as “every-day events” or “supernatural interventions” they are certainly tokens. They are “things serving as a visible or tangible representation of a fact or quality.” Tokens testify to the fact of God’s goodness, and to the quality of his being good.
But tokens of God’s goodness are not limited to those.
There are other signs.
I know.
The Sign
About an hour after I cried out, I hung my mailbag around my neck—I can’t carry mail on crutches—and hobbled out the front door. I always look left as I head out the door, in the rock garden, to a particular flower pot.
My son had sprinkled seeds into it in May, I’d plucked an occasional weed in June, and the tender shoots were pruned by our resident deer in July.
I despaired of a bloom.
But on the very day I prayed for a sign of God’s goodness, I crutched out and I saw this.
I saw this single, brilliant orange bloom.
My phone identified it as monk’s cress, a garden nasturtium. But whatever its name, that bright blossom was a sure sign, a token of a truth—that God is good to me.
My friend has a magnet on her fridge that says, “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.”
I looked at five orange petals and I saw God’s goodness.
He wants you to see it too.
In our darkest hours, on our hardest days
We do not have to be afraid
For You will never leave, You will not forsake
The promises You have made
And we can say that
We will never see the end
We will never see the end of Your goodness
—Jess Ray, “Never See the End“
