Keep Your Eyes Open

Jake Frost ponders some of the wonderful and amazing little details that show us the work of God.

There’s something in the human mind that delights in the telling detail. Gazing into the night sky, out of all the vast cosmos, we find individual stars and draw lines between them to make constellations. 

In The Three Handed icon, The Tricherousa, a single detail, the third hand, a small silver hand in the lower left corner which appears to be a third hand of Our Lady, encapsulates the story of Saint John of Damascus. Saint John of Damascus, Doctor of the Church, was a truth teller, and telling the truth is a dangerous business. But that’s what saints do. In his case, it cost him his hand. His truth-telling angered the powerful, and they arranged to separate his writing hand from his arm to prevent him from ever writing again.

He prayed before the icon that now bears The Third Hand, and Our Lady came to him, healed his hand, and charged him to use his writing gift in the service of Christ. She wanted him to go on telling the truth. In thanks, he had a silver hand made and affixed it to the icon, where it remains to this day, giving The Three Handed icon its name. 

Or the famous painting The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt, where the meaning of the painting turns on one small detail—the missing detail: there is no door handle on the outside of the door where Christ knocks, because it is the door to the human heart which can only be opened from within. 

The ram of sacrifice that is offered by Abraham in place of his son Isaac has its horns tangled in thorns, and the Lamb of God goes to be sacrificed with a tangle of thorns in a crown upon His head.  

Telling details draw connections, conveying meaning. 

In our own lives, the same sorts of things occur. There’s the famous story of Jordan Peterson’s wife, Tammy, healed of terminal cancer after praying, a healing that many consider miraculous. She had told her husband, three months prior to being healed, that she would be well by their wedding anniversary. And that is the day when she was healed. That small detail, that date ... that prediction three months before.

When asked in an interview with EWTN if he believed it was a miracle, Dr. Peterson said that while her recovery itself was improbable, “the fact that she survived and she predicted when she was going to recover, that’s a harder thing to wave away.” 

Tammy Peterson entered the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil this year, and noted in an interview with Relevant Radio that she had prayed for five weeks when she first got sick, then said a five day novena before she was healed, and five years after being healed, she entered the Catholic Church. She reported that her friend, who had started praying the Rosary with her during those first five weeks, observed: “God’s a poet.” 

God is a poet, and a Gift Giver, and the meaning in those little details is another gift wrapped in the miracles themselves. Those little details, worked with such care, help us to see, so that we can recognize the wonders He works and the love He lavishes on us.  

In our family, my Grandma Evelyn quilted a pillow for each of her great-grandchildren when they were born. All four of my children received one.  

Or, I should say, my first four children each received one. 

Because almost a decade after the birth of what we thought was our last child, we received another, unexpected blessing. We named her Evelyn after her great-grandmother, who had died about seven years before little Evelyn’s birth. 

Then, shortly after little Evelyn was born, my Mom was cleaning out a closet in her sewing room and stumbled upon a find: Grandma Evelyn had sewn extra pillows, anticipating that there might be more great-grandchildren born after she was gone (she was right) and there was one pillow left, the last, just for little Evelyn.  

More connections.  

It’s a fun way to live, keeping your eyes open to see what He’s doing in our lives and what might come next! 

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Copyright 2024 Jake Frost
Images: English: traditionally St. John Damascene, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; William Holman Hunt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Canva