Rachael Ayres is a lifelong learner, wild dreamer, sourdough baker and traveller who loves solitude, words, ideas, fibre arts, walking long distances and spending time with family and friends. She is a member of Auckland’s Titirangi Baptist Church.
The year is 1974, and the location is a typical suburban Kiwi neighbourhood. Zoom in on the scene, and you’ll see a brick house with a covered back porch and three steps up to the kitchen doorstep. Zoom in closer, and you’ll spot a little girl sitting on the doorstep. She’s busily making her way through the biggest bar of chocolate you could buy at the time.
Suddenly, her mother finds them both, the child and the chocolate, and asks, “Who told you that you could have that?” It’s probably a rhetorical question in her mind; clearly, no one has given permission. But the four-year-old child, unaware of the imminent telling-off brewing, finishes chewing, swallows the sweetness and answers believingly, “Jesus did.”
The telling-off fades, and whenever she later recounts the story, the mother will pose the question, ‘who can argue with Jesus?’
There’s no telling-off, but the conversation isn’t quite over.
“Hmm, Jesus just told me you’ve had enough.”
I was the little girl, and though half a century has now passed, I still love chocolate – and I still listen to Jesus.
As a slightly older child, I was fascinated with the idea that God knew everything. In Sunday School, I learned how Abram was told to count all the stars in the sky. On the rare occasion that I was outside at night, I was in awe of just how many stars there were – and that God knew them all and that He could count every single one, even though Abram and I couldn’t. At the beach, I would watch the waves rolling in one after another, and I knew that God was making this happen. What’s more, He kept doing it even after I’d gone home.
At the same time, God was also causing each blade of grass to grow, making leaves unfurl on trees and moving the clouds into constantly changing pictures in the sky. I had heard the story about God knowing if a sparrow fell to the ground, and I saw sparrows every day. I would watch them flying around the backyard, one in this direction, another in that, and it gave me a sense of security that God knew what they were doing. God was inviting me into a relationship with Himself, even though I didn’t know it at the time.
One day in my early teens, I wondered to myself, ‘What is faith?’ Faith was one of those religious-y words like grace and redemption and atonement and worship that got thrown around at church, and I thirsted to understand it. Imagine my surprise when I opened my Bible to Hebrews 11 and read, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” God had heard me, and He had answered.
As a young mother, I was told the existence of a stay-at-home mum was hard and mundane. Wanting a more positive narrative, and by now believing that every moment is sacred, I decided to look for the fingerprints of God in that space. I was not disappointed. I had already met God the Creator and God who would speak to me; I met Him now as God who reveals Himself in beauty. Being awake and feeding a newborn in the moments before the sun rose was when I first became aware of the dawn chorus. Taking walks outdoors with young children reminded me of the joys of watching a snail slither along a path. Moving at a child’s pace gave me time to notice buds about to burst on the plum tree, a butterfly set to escape a chrysalis, and the first pea shoots emerging from the dark earth. Beauty was the light falling golden across the shock of curls snuggled on the couch behind a book. Sometimes, beauty giggled or laughed long. Once, it came in the form of a three-year-old child offering the last piece of cake to his sister. There was beauty in creation, beauty in words, beauty in music, beauty in hospitality, beauty in friendship. God has whispered to me in and through all these things.
Now, I am a grandmother and have the joy again of inviting little ones to look for the fingerprints of God as we go about our days. Together, we are discovering Him everywhere, seeing what He is doing, learning to hear His voice, and getting to know and love Him. He is constantly present, and I have discovered Him everywhere. He hasn’t given me any more chocolate, but His companionship has been unending.
Photo: Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash
