My wife and I needed to replace the wood stove on the lower level of our cabin in the Blue Mountains this year for it has become a safety hazard. So, last Tuesday we visited a stove store in Elgin, Oregon, to buy a replacement, and we learned the most fascinating information about what the trained eye can perceive that the untrained eye ignores.

The man who does the work was not in, but his wife greeted us and was a most gracious and a knowledgeable help.

She asked us several questions about the condition and state of our chimney to determine how much work needed to be done before the new stove could be installed. We were clueless on how to answer most of her questions, and began to wonder how many delays would transpire before the replacement could be made.

Then I brought out several pictures my wife had taken of the stove and its chimney. The woman looked at the pictures and pulled out one snapshot of the metal caps on top of the roof. The picture showed very little and looked quite meaningless to the casual eye, but she exclaimed, “Oh, Grant can figure out all the answers to our questions by looking at this picture.”

She explained that her husband could tell the age of the chimney, the quality of the piping, whether it needed to be swept or not from seeing that 6’ cap on top of the A-frame. Our jaws went a gap. I awed at how much knowledge an experienced eye could gain from such a small piece of evidence.

Then she blurted, “Maybe he knows your chimney already! Is your cabin located in a visible place from a main road?” And she further explained that he notices everyone’s chimney while driving to and from jobs. It was his work, “To know chimneys!” And we awed a bit more.

“Of course,” I later thought. “This man knows chimneys like a pianist knows the keys on a keyboard. He understands and finds meaning in minute details that the average person takes for granted.”

In seeking a spiritual lesson from this conversational exchange, I decided that we all should be just as observant of God’s presence at work in our environment as this chimney-sweep was of his neighbor’s stove-pipes. He needed to see only a few inches of evidence to deduce a huge sum of information not visible to the naked eye.

Do you notice your neighbor’s chimneys? Probably not, if it’s not your business to know chimneys.

But more importantly, do you notice your neighbor’s full blown God-given spiritual selfhood, even when it’s not obvious?

A simple good deed, a little smile, a kind gesture, a steadfast presence, is the “few inches of evidence” that indicate a much greater and grander spirituality underneath that is not always apparent to the naked eye because there are so many other things that would distract our attention.

But if we’re willing to look into the details, to study existence closely, we’ll find evidence of good where good doesn’t seem to exist because we aren’t paying attention.

I’ve learned through this that we mustn’t drive on through life ignoring the obvious. Signs of God’s presence are everywhere, but sometimes only noticeable in the smallest of details. Like the chimney-sweep trained to know chimneys inside and out, we can be a God-sweep, trained to know God’s wonderful creation inside and out from whatever vantage point we’re sitting.

Enjoy the view!