Are You Seeking the Parabolic Signs?

Robert Linder on Unsplash

Well, this is a first for me.  A dream where I saw something, and received a sense that I was to write about it - along with a word I had never heard before.

It was an image of a baseball field - a Little League one to be exact.  It was deserted, but as I walked through it - I could see that a game had been played there recently.  There were the scuff marks of the runners - with a big scuffed up area at home base.  There were the marks of a pitcher having been standing on the pitching mound.  There was a batting helmet, lying in the dirt near home plate, either knocked off or thrown down.  In the stands, there were crushed peanut shells; not crushed and eaten but crushed as though in frustration in someone’s hand - then thrown in anger on the ground.  There were all the leftover snacks of the fans in the stands, left in haste.

Looking around at all the signs, the word came to me: “parabolic signs”.  It was obvious that a game had just been played.  Seeing the clues, it appeared that there was a play at the plate that caused the game to end abruptly, and unexpectedly.  From the crushed peanuts in the stands, it was obvious that people were upset at the ending - threw their things down and stormed off.  Same too with the batting helmet.  It was either knocked off in this epic play at the plate; or thrown down in disgust.

All these things were able to be deduced by just looking at the remaining ‘clues’ at the scene of this game in my dream.  And it came to me - if men can easily read the ‘parabolic signs’ of a little league game - then why are they so stupid when it comes to reading the signs for God?

I had never heard the word ‘parabolic’ before; but I wrote it down and then looked it up.  No surprise, it relates to a parable - the kind of speech that Jesus always used.  A form of speech that would cause a listener to examine closer, to think, to ponder. 

Or to NOT. 

There seems to be a lot of ‘nots’ happening these days.  We have become a blinded people.  We can so easily ‘read the signs’ of everything else going on - but not the signs that God has put everywhere for us to FIND Him.

The word ‘parabolic’ has synonyms.  They are: ‘legendary, mythical, mythic, fabulous, heroic, folkloric’... and on and on.  All, I suppose, synonyms of God too.

  Proverbs 25:2 notes that “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out.”

  Perhaps the reason we have lost so much of our glory in this world - now dealing only with the mundane, the material, the knowable - is because we have stopped ‘searching out’ the things of God.  I talk with people everywhere - they can go on and on and on about politics, about things ‘happening’ in the news, about sports, about everything that is plain and surface deep.  Yet who can go on and on about the things that betray the Glory of God?  Who can see into the spiritual realm; and know what is REALLY going on in the world? 

Almost no one anymore.

We used to be wiser.  We used to seek the ‘matters of God’ with our whole hearts and souls - and because of that, we used to be solid people of light and substance walking through this world. Now we are just reflections of what the world wants us to be.  Just a shell.  And an empty one at that...

The ‘parabolic signs’ are all around us.  Will we turn off the TV, the computer, the ‘social media’, the ‘regular media’ - and actually look for them?  Will we make a difference - an eternal difference - in this world; or just continue as ‘Flat Stanley’s’ as we do nothing more than float through this life?

  I guess, ultimately, that the choice is ours.  But it is a choice - not without consequences.  Perhaps we need to be choosing more wisely.