When the Moment Changes Everything: Learning to See What God Is Doing

There is a phrase that has become almost inescapable in modern culture. You hear it in movie trailers, television advertisements, and news headlines. "The moment that changed everything." We are obsessed with defining moments, with the idea that a single event can rewrite the story of a life. And while there is truth in that instinct, the question worth sitting with is this: what actually makes a moment significant? What gives it power? And perhaps most importantly, are we asking the right questions when we find ourselves inside one?
The ninth chapter of the Gospel of John opens with a scene that feels both ancient and remarkably familiar. Jesus and his disciples are walking along a road when they encounter a man who has been blind since birth. The disciples, seeing something unusual, something that defies easy explanation, do what human beings almost always do when they encounter suffering or hardship. They start looking for someone to blame.
"Who sinned," they ask, "this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
It is a question that reveals everything about how they understood the world. In their day, there was a widely held belief that suffering was the direct consequence of sin. If you were afflicted, someone had done something wrong. Either you had sinned, perhaps even before birth in some mysterious way, or your parents had, and you were now paying the price. The universe, in their view, was a place where punishment was always being distributed and someone was always at fault.
We may read that and feel distant from it, but if we are honest, we have not traveled as far as we might think. We still live in a world saturated with blame. We still hear people say that someone was "just born bad," or that a child never had a chance given the family they came from. We still watch public discourse collapse into arguments about who is responsible for every problem, every failure, every tragedy. When blame is placed on someone else, there is a certain relief in it. If it is their fault, then it is not ours. We are free to stand at a comfortable distance and observe.
But Jesus refuses to play that game.
His response to the disciples is not simply an answer to their question. It is a redirection of their entire way of thinking. He tells them that neither the man nor his parents sinned to cause this blindness. Then he says something that can be misread if we are not careful. He says the man was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. This is not a statement that God deliberately inflicted blindness on this man as a kind of divine setup. It is not a claim that God engineers suffering for the sake of a dramatic demonstration. Rather, Jesus is pointing toward a different way of seeing the moment entirely. Instead of asking who is to blame, ask where God is at work.
That shift, from blame to discernment, is at the heart of everything that follows.
The word discernment comes from roots meaning to detect, to recognize, to perceive. In spiritual practice, discernment is the discipline of learning to see what God is doing in the ordinary and extraordinary moments of life. It is not passive. It requires attention, honesty, and a willingness to let go of the explanations we have already decided on before we even look closely at what is in front of us.
Jesus demonstrates discernment in action. He does not stand at a distance and offer a theological lecture about suffering. He kneels down, uses mud and saliva, and sends the man to wash in the pool of Siloam. And the man, who never even asked to be healed, comes back seeing. Grace arrived without being requested. Abundance appeared where there had been only lack. Light came where there had been only darkness. This is the character of God that Jesus is revealing, not a God who selects people for suffering, but a God who moves toward people with healing, with wholeness, with life.
And yet the religious authorities, when they hear what has happened, cannot bring themselves to simply receive it. They call the man back and tell him to give glory to God, but in the same breath they declare that Jesus is a sinner. They want the miracle without the one who performed it. They want the result without the relationship. They are still asking the wrong questions.
The man's response is one of the most quietly powerful statements in all of scripture. He does not argue theology. He does not try to defend Jesus or debate the finer points of religious law. He simply says what he knows to be true. He summarizes John 9:25 this way: he does not know whether Jesus is a sinner, but he knows one thing with absolute certainty. He was blind, and now he sees.
That is a witness. That is what discernment produces. Not a comprehensive explanation of every mystery, but a clear-eyed account of what has actually happened in your life when God showed up.
This is an invitation worth accepting in our own lives. When suffering arrives, when confusion sets in, when we find ourselves in the middle of a moment that feels impossible to understand, the blaming question will always be available. It will feel natural. It will feel satisfying in a hollow kind of way. But the discerning question opens something entirely different. Where is God in this? What is grace doing here that I might be missing because I am too busy assigning fault?
Repentance, which simply means turning around and moving back toward God, is only possible because God has not abandoned us in our worst moments. The Spirit remains present, not to condemn, not to expose, but to remind us that we are not alone and that the goodness of God is still being poured out.
The defining moments of a life are not defined by what went wrong or who is to blame. They are defined by whether we had the eyes to see what God was doing in them all along.