It was a walk I took almost every day. The same old path through the same patch of olive trees and dirt. It was nice to be doing something I was sure of. Everything else in my life seemed to be in a vortex of confusion, a fog I couldn't see past. I took the walk almost blindly, not paying attention to anything around me. But on this day, I noticed an unfamiliar figure on the horizon. What I saw was a snow-capped mountain. 

This was a strange sight because I lived in a city in the middle of a desert. The prettiest parts of my walk were the olive tree groves and the poppies that would appear during the spring. Now, my backdrop had a mountain. I could see the snow cap, and judging by its size, it felt close, but I knew it had to be far away. It was brilliant, majestic, foreboding, and beautiful. Where had it been all this time? How could I not have seen this earlier? 

I discovered through some research that this mountain was the Mt. Hermon mentioned in the Bible. I didn't even know it would be visible from where we lived. The sand and dust in our everyday view covered it most of the time, but on this day, the dust cleared enough to make it visible. It had been there all the time, every day on my seemingly blasé walk to town.

Amid my wonderment, God gently poked me and said, "You know, I've always been here, too." The fog I had been living in had made me wonder if God even knew where I was or what I had been going through. Every night I had fallen asleep thinking, "Hello, are you there? Can you see me?  'Cause I can't see You." I had become so caught up in trying to figure everything out on my own. I had lost trust that He had the solution because it didn't seem like He was even listening. 

Just because I couldn't "see" Him, feel Him, or hear Him didn’t make the fact that He was always there less true. I just had to wait for the dust to blow over and the fog to clear and then look a little closer. Did it make everything instantly better? No, but I could walk a little more sure, with a bit more confidence and a bit more trust, knowing He was listening. Perhaps I wasn't as lost as I felt.

No matter what we go through, He will always be there. Even when we can't see Him, He is there. Of this we can be sure.