Total Eclipse

Dan Kunz

If you’ve been following the news, or if you happened to be in Spain this week, you know that northern and central Spain experienced a total solar eclipse.  It’s a very infrequent occurrence.  Total solar eclipses only take place about every eighteen months anywhere on the planet.  A total solar eclipse in a particular location may only take place every three to four hundred years!  Today, eclipses may prompt people to travel thousands of miles and invest thousands of dollars to experience one.  In ancient times, a total eclipse might have brought on complete hysteria, as people wondered what was happening.  Is it the end of the world?  Are the gods angry with us?  Because of modern science, we know an eclipse is a natural phenomenon which occurs when either the moon gets between the earth and the sun (solar), or the earth gets between the sun and the moon (lunar).  It’s breath-taking to see the aura or glow around the sun without being able to actually see the sun itself.  A similar thing sometimes happens to us in a spiritual sense.

One such eclipse happens when catastrophic events occur in our life.  The loss of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, or divorce, can all make it seem as if God has disappeared.  Our trouble or challenges can hide God from our sight.  Just as in a real eclipse, the world can become a very dark and scary place!  Unlike our ancestors, who may not have understood what was happening, we know the sun (or the moon) is still there.  It’s only being hidden for a while.  The same is true of a spiritual eclipse.  It’s critical to remember that God is still in the heavens, still loving us, still watching over us.  We may not see him, but he’s there, nonetheless.  Like a solar eclipse, we may not see him, and yet we can see the aura or glow, the evidence of his existence, his work in our lives.

At times, we, ourselves, pretend God doesn’t exist.  We may even push him away or cover him up with our egregious sins against him.  We’re like the child who covers his ears and sings, “La-la-la”, to drown out what he doesn’t want to hear.  Maybe we don’t always want God to be there.  It’s much easier to sin if we convince ourselves no one is watching or no one will hold us accountable.  “It’s no big deal.”  “The world has changed.”  “It’s my life.”  Those are all arguments with which we (or the Devil) convince ourselves our choices are perfectly fine.  We get in the way of God. We eclipse him. 

We must never forget that although, for a variety of reasons, a total eclipse of God may be going on in our lives, he is always there, unchangeable, always loving us, and doing what’s best for us. 

Psalm 115:3 Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him.  A God who loved us enough to sacrifice his Son for us and continues to desire us every single day, is never going to leave us to fend for ourselves.  We may not see him, but he always sees us!  That can be scary, but it should be a comforting thought throughout our lives.