Racoons are not animals you want to encounter during the day.
Typically, if you bump into a raccoon during business hours, it’s either rabid or roadkill. Both options are unpleasant at best.
You can understand, then, why I paused when a raccoon suddenly crossed my path while I was alone in the woods—in broad daylight.
This was pre-pandemic and pre-children. My wife and I were helping to facilitate a silent retreat at a retreat center just outside of Baltimore, Maryland. As is the case on such a retreat, there was plenty of time for solitude and quiet reflection.
And so, I’d wandered off into the woods, passing enormous hay bales and silent farming equipment, the omnipresent buzzing of any number of tiny insects growing louder and louder with every step. It was sunny and hot and I had just gotten to the top of a hill, pausing to look back over the path I’d trod.
I jumped at the sound of rustling leaves, no more than a few feet in front of me. The raccoon came loping out, paying me no mind at all, just crossing the path and going about its own affairs.
It’s tempting, I think, to assign cosmic meaning to every detail in our life—particularly details as seemingly random as a raccoon on retreat. That’s what a retreat is all about, right? Piecing together those clues that will grant clarity to life’s many mysteries.
I stood there in those woods, shocked. What did it mean? What was God trying to tell me through this small, woodland creature? Growing up, I’d tried to talk my parents into letting me get a raccoon as a pet; was God pointing me to some long-forgotten childhood memory?
Long minutes passed, and no revelation came. So, I headed back to the retreat center with a grin. What was I to make of such an odd occurrence?
We often find ourselves on one end of a spectrum: Either, every little thing in our life happens for some as-of-yet unknown reason, scraps of a master plan pushing us slowly toward some specific destiny. Or, everything is random and meaningless.
But if we believe that God is present in all things, then we might look at these seemingly random events a little differently. Rather than looking for clues to help us figure out the mystery of our own life, what if we looked at our life and our world as a window into God’s very self—joyful, surprising, compassionate?
Ours is a God who desires to enter more deeply into our daily lives, into the joys and challenges. Rarely do we get a ready-made roadmap, charting us through the treacherous waters of our life.
Rather, God gives us little winks. Not a clue, not a random anecdote. Just a little wink to remind us that God is there, present, intimate and engaged in our days, nudging us in new directions, helping us better understand our life.
Those God winks may not give us any answers but they do lead us to wonder. And wonder leads us deeper into ourselves and our world.
Sometimes those winks come shaped as a raccoon, a raccoon that literally stops you in your tracks and makes you wonder what God might be up to.
