The Mote in God's Eye

Pastor’s Epistle—April 2026

Years ago, I saw a little miracle.

After a funeral, in the bleak midwinter, we set out to the cemetery for a graveside committal. The wind whipped up something wicked, lashing at our coats and scouring any exposed flesh. The air temperature, without windchill, had plunged into the negative 20s. The family proved reluctant to get out of their cars, but soldiered on, following my lead.

You should’ve seen the grimaces on the faces of the men when I took off my hat to pray, knowing that they ought to follow suit. Not that I could blame them. Have pity on the bald.

Graveside committals typically don’t take terribly long. If one follows the Occasional Services book, we’re only out there for five to 10 minutes. At one point, the officiant—that would be me—pours out a cylinder of sand, the symbolic first handful of grave dirt, whilst intoning, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Given that we were standing exposed in what felt like a wind-tunnel, I fully expected the sand, fine and dry as it was, to explode into the air, possibly peppering the assembled mourners. But as I emptied the cylinder onto the casket, making a little cross of sand, not one single grain moved. Not a mote. As the undertaker closed out the ceremony, I wanted to elbow him in the ribs, to point to the particulate cross seemingly defying the laws of physics.

The wind was vicious, and there wasn’t a thing to block it: no trees, no tombstones, no mourners, no nothing. You can say that there must’ve been something, but I’m telling you, there wasn’t. And I stared the whole time that the casket was lowered, slowly, into the grave, expecting at any moment a tiny tornado of sand scattered across the snows. It never budged: a minor, private miracle, easy to dismiss but impossible to ignore.

This came to mind more recently, at a different and much later funeral, when I saw the same thing happen again. I was just as silently shocked. And I watched the entire time, until the grave vault sealed. I suppose that I could rationalize the experience away—I used to be a scientist by training and by trade—but I’d be lying to myself, and I’d know it. It felt like a reminder, like a glimpse. Of what, I can’t quite say. Something more.

I’ve certainly had stranger experiences. I won’t go into the wilder ones, lest you question my credibility. Perhaps you have already. Personally, I suspect that we all have similar such inexplicable experiences tucked away in our memories, glossed over perhaps, or maybe polished and cherished like my little crosses of sand. The wonder, dreamlike, fades, as the miraculous gives way to the everyday mundane. But still.

Hold onto those moments, those reminders of something more. They ground us, even as they lift heavenward our gaze.

In Jesus. Amen.