I've tried to stay away from imagining specific answers to my prayers, but I think it's safe to imagine what the effect would be. I explained that in a prevous post, but I also have a recent and vivid example of the kind of sudden insight I'd expect from a revelation. It has to do with something I found recently that looked a lot like this graphic:
After my father died, we had to sort out his house. Eighty-one years of his memories
were tucked into corners, closets,
drawers, and boxes. It was overwhelming to try to make sense of it all, even
though we knew the basic framework of Dad’s story and his life.
My father was a scientist, and so I wasn’t surprised to come
across across a stack of glossy papers that appeared to be chemical test
results of some kind. Bleeding out
horizontally from the vertical middle of the page were two symmetrical gray
stains of slightly different shades, kind of like a Rorschach test. I was
tempted to throw them out as garbage, but I set them aside.
When I came back to them later that day, my brother was with
me, and I asked him if he knew what these were.
“They’re pictures of the old cabin!” he said enthusiastically, telling
me that our grandfather used to own a family cabin on one of the lakes near
Dad’s home town.
Then my brother took the pages from my hand, turning them
sideways to view them. Viewed sideways, those vertical chemical stains
transformed into faded black-and-white images of a lakeshore. The old pictures were taken from across the
water, and the water’s reflection created the symmetrical “stain.”
“Oh,” I said.
