Romans 1:19
...since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

It's been a tough afternoon. I've sunk an aircraft carrier, a battleship, a destroyer, and a cruiser all while trying to keep my son, parker, from destroying mine. I won - barely - but I was reminded again that Battleship is NOT how God reveals Himself to me or you or anyone else for that matter.

With God, it's not about hitting or missing. He takes no pleasure in hiding who He is from our desperate attempts to find Him. He does not relegate His children to doing what I did a few weeks ago at the one-car parade that our town held to honor Kellie Pickler of American Idol fame. There I was trying to hold up my almost 80-pound son so that he could hopefully peek through the 20 trees to see a small female shape wearing a red shirt. God isn't like that. He is a God who takes great pleasure in making what we can know about Him plain. The problem seems to be that we are a people who take great pains to make it seem like God is the wizard behind the curtain who can never be seen or understood.

I think that we think that if we can make others think that God is hard to understand, then we won't really be responsible for not doing what He says. After all, when I beat Parker in Battleship, he can always walk away convincing himself that it was just too hard and he would have won if only that piece of the gameboard wasn't sticking up, blocking his view of my pieces. But what if my pieces were in plian view and he still lost? Then he'd have to conclude that he was at worst an idiot and at best just not quite good enough. And maybe that's where we all need to be with God.

Maybe it would be good for us to admit that God really is making Himself plain but we aren't smart enough, good enough or "anything else" enough to really see Him. Maybe then we would ask for help. But that would require taking down the blinders that we've put up between our lives and the God Who is pointing Himself out to us like a big old neon arrow at a Texas steakhouse.

Please don't mistake this to mean that I think God is easy to understand. I don't. I think He's extrememly difficult to understand at times. But I do think that he is easy to see...if our eyes are open.

Are they?