Faith In The Ordinary

On Aliens, Spectacle, Distraction, and the One Encounter That Changes Everything

I. We Have Always Looked Up

Something in us has always scanned the heavens.

Long before satellite dishes and radio telescopes, long before NASA and SETI and congressional hearings about unidentified aerial phenomena, human beings have stood beneath the stars and quietly wondered: Is there something else out there? Something more than us? Something watching?

That hunger is ancient. And in the last century, it has exploded into full cultural spectacle.

Consider what we have done with it. We have built entire cinematic universes around the idea of extraterrestrial contact. Steven Spielberg gave us Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) — a film whose very title has become embedded in our language — where a quiet, ordinary man is so compelled by an inexplicable experience that he abandons everything to chase it. Spielberg would later revisit the theme in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), while other filmmakers continued the fascination through films such as Independence Day (1996), Contact (1997), Signs (2002), and Arrival (2016).

Even now, nearly fifty years after Close Encounters, the fascination has not faded. Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, returns once again to themes of mystery, revelation, and humanity’s longing to understand what lies beyond the visible. It seems we remain captivated by the possibility that there is something more — some greater reality waiting to break into our ordinary existence.

Hollywood has spent billions imagining the moment humanity finally meets something from beyond our world. Perhaps that fascination itself tells us something. Perhaps beneath the stories, the speculation, and the endless search for signs lies a deeper hunger: not merely to discover that we are not alone, but to encounter the One for whom we were made.

The 1977 UFO classification system that gave Spielberg his title sorted encounters by type: sightings from a distance were first kind encounters. Physical evidence was second kind. Actual contact with an extraterrestrial being — that was the third kind. The close encounter. The one that changes everything.

And we are fascinated. Collectively, irresistibly fascinated.

In recent years, that fascination has moved from the cultural fringe to the corridors of power. The United States government has declassified footage of unidentified aerial phenomena. Former military pilots have testified before Congress about objects that defied known physics. A former intelligence official claimed, under oath, that non-human craft have been recovered. The phenomenon is no longer dismissed — it is investigated, debated, and taken seriously at the highest levels.

We are, as a species, leaning forward. Straining to see. Desperate for contact.

The irony is devastating: we are obsessively searching the cosmos for a sign while missing the encounter that has been available to us all along.

Because here is what gets almost no cultural attention, no congressional hearing, no cinematic budget:

The most extraordinary encounter available to a human being is not with something from the outer reaches of space. It is with the God who made space itself. And unlike every alien encounter film ever made, this one does not require a mountain in Wyoming, a radio telescope in New Mexico, or a spacecraft landing on the White House lawn.

It requires something far more difficult than any of that. It requires us to be still.

II. The Spectacle We Were Promised

Part of why we keep looking to the skies is that we have been trained — by culture, by entertainment, by the sheer drama of modern life — to expect the extraordinary to arrive in spectacular form.

When we imagine divine encounter, we tend to imagine something like the movies: blinding light, parted skies, audible voice, unmistakable sign. We want the burning mountain. We want the handwriting on the wall. We want the kind of moment that leaves no room for doubt, no room for ambiguity, no room for the terrifying possibility that we might have to choose to believe.

And so we wait. We wait for the spectacular. We wait for the irrefutable. We wait for the encounter that will be so obvious, so undeniable, so cinematically overwhelming that faith will no longer feel like faith — it will feel like simply seeing.

But Scripture has a strange habit of subverting that expectation.

The prophet Elijah, burned out and suicidal in the wilderness, was told that God was about to pass by. What followed was a sequence that reads almost like a Hollywood trailer: a great wind that tore the mountains apart, an earthquake, a fire. Spectacular. Undeniable. Overwhelming. Then the text says something quietly devastating: God was not in the wind. God was not in the earthquake. God was not in the fire.

What came after the fire was a still, small voice. Some translations say a gentle whisper. The Hebrew is almost untranslatable — it is something like the sound of sheer silence. And it was there — in the silence after the spectacle — that the encounter happened

We are waiting for the earthquake while God is whispering in the silence we are desperately filling with noise.

The pattern repeats throughout Scripture. A burning bush on an unremarkable hillside. A voice in the night to a sleeping boy. A stranger on a road to Emmaus whom two disciples walked beside for hours without recognition. A whisper to a prophet hiding in a cave. A still morning by a lake and a question asked three times over charcoal and fish.

The encounters are rarely what anyone expected. They are intimate. They are quiet. They are embedded in the fabric of ordinary life. Which raises an uncomfortable question for those of us living in 2026: What have we done to our capacity for quiet?

III. The Bush Was Always There

There is a detail in the story of Moses that tends to get overlooked in the drama of the burning bush. Moses was not on a spiritual retreat. He was not fasting or praying or seeking a divine encounter. He was doing his job — tending his father-in-law’s flocks in the wilderness, the same work he had been doing for forty years. It was an ordinary day on an ordinary hillside when he noticed something unusual: a bush that appeared to be burning but was not being consumed. The text then records a sentence that deserves to stop us cold: Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight.’ He turned aside.

That is the hinge point of the entire encounter. Not the fire. Not the voice. Not the divine commission that would follow. The hinge was a man in the middle of an ordinary workday who noticed something and chose to turn toward it rather than away from it. And it was when God saw that Moses had turned aside to look that He called to him from the bush.

The encounter waited on the attention. Which makes us wonder: How many burning bushes have we walked past? How many holy moments have been embedded in ordinary mornings, ordinary commutes, ordinary conversations that gone entirely unnoticed because we never paused long enough to look?

The tragedy is not that God has gone silent. It is that we have become too distracted to notice burning bushes.

The ground beneath Moses’s feet was declared holy before he took his sandals off. It was holy when he walked onto it. It had perhaps been holy for some time. Moses simply hadn’t known. That is not a comforting thought but rather a confronting one. It means the problem is rarely the absence of God. It is the presence of distraction. And if that was true for a shepherd in the Sinai Peninsula three thousand years ago, it is almost unimaginably more true for a person walking through the twenty-first century with a glowing rectangle in their pocket and the world’s entire noise supply streaming directly into their ears.

IV. We Have Become Experts at Avoidance

Here is something worth considering: the conditions that make genuine encounter possible are the exact conditions that modern life is engineered to prevent. Encounter requires stillness. We have filled every silence.

Encounter requires attention. We have fragmented our attention into a thousand pieces and handed the pieces to platforms designed to hold them hostage. Encounter requires honesty. We have built elaborate digital personas that allow us to be seen without actually being known. Encounter requires vulnerability. We have become so practiced at performance — even spiritual performance — that many of us have lost the ability to simply sit before God without an agenda, a format, or a carefully curated presentation of who we want Him to think we are. Encounter requires interruption. We have scheduled and optimized our lives to the point where an interruption is experienced not as a gift but as a threat.

And so we move through our days — busy, stimulated, connected, and profoundly alone — wondering vaguely why God feels distant while simultaneously doing everything in our power to avoid the silence in which He speaks.

Silence has become threatening because silence removes distraction. And distraction is often the only thing standing between us and what we are trying not to feel.

There is a particular cruelty to spiritual busyness — the version of avoidance that wears religious clothing. We fill our lives with Christian content: podcasts, worship playlists, Instagram devotionals, conference schedules, Bible plans we complete without ever actually slowing down to let the words find us. We consume spirituality at scale while remaining largely unavailable for the encounter it is supposed to point toward.

The difference between consuming spiritual content and encountering God is roughly the difference between watching a documentary about the ocean and standing at the edge of it in bare feet. One is interesting. The other does something to you.

We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at watching documentaries.

V. The Counterfeit and the Real

Every generation develops its own preferred substitutes for genuine encounter. Ours are perhaps more sophisticated than most, but the impulse is ancient.

The people of Israel built a golden calf because Moses was taking too long on the mountain. They were not trying to worship something other than God — they were trying to manufacture a version of God they could manage, contain, and access on their own terms. A God who waited while they built Him rather than one who called them to abandon their schedules and climb.

We do not melt down jewellery to make golden calves. But we do design worship experiences engineered for emotional response. We do pursue spiritual aesthetics — the right atmosphere, the right lighting, the right musical key — because atmosphere can produce feeling, and feeling can be mistaken for presence. We do chase the viral revelation, the conference high, the retreat moment that will finally make everything click, the prayer formula that will unlock the encounter we have been looking for.

None of these things are necessarily wrong. Music and community and teaching and retreat are genuine gifts. But gifts can become substitutes. The menu can become the meal. The signpost can become the destination.

And here is the thing about counterfeits: they are convincing precisely because they resemble the real thing. A spiritual experience that produces emotion but demands nothing — that leaves us feeling elevated without leaving us exposed — is deeply attractive. It gives us enough of the form of encounter to satisfy the surface hunger without risking the depth of what genuine encounter would actually do to us.

Many have consumed vast quantities of spiritual content and yet never sat quietly before God long enough to be truly undone by Him.

Because genuine encounter undoes things. That is the part the documentaries leave out.

VI. What Real Encounter Actually Does

Read the accounts carefully. Not the sanitized versions — the actual texts.

Isaiah has a vision of the Lord in the temple, high and exalted, and his first response is not joy. It is collapse. ‘Woe to me,’ he cries. ‘I am ruined. I am a man of unclean lips.’ He does not feel elevated. He feels destroyed.

Peter, after the miraculous catch of fish, falls at Jesus’s knees and says, ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man.’ He has just witnessed a miracle and his instinct is to beg the miracle-worker to leave.

Jacob wrestles with God through the night and walks with a limp for the rest of his life. He received both a blessing and a wound, and neither one can be separated from the other.

Job, after chapters of eloquent argument, encounters God speaking from the whirlwind — and what follows is not answers. What follows is God asking Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid. Job’s response, after all his speeches, is silence and repentance.

Paul is knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus, blinded, and has to be led by the hand into the city where he fasts for three days.

The pattern is not ambiguous. Real encounter exposes. It dismantles. It interrupts the narrative we have constructed about ourselves and replaces it with something more true and more uncomfortable.

The frightening thing about God is not merely that He sees us. It is that He sees us completely — and we know it the moment He does.

Every mask becomes unsustainable in genuine encounter. Every performance collapses. Every carefully managed version of ourselves that we present to the world — and perhaps to ourselves — becomes suddenly, mercilessly transparent.

And this is exactly what we are afraid of. This is why we stay busy. This is why we fill the silence. This is why we prefer the counterfeit — not because we don’t believe the real thing is there, but because some part of us suspects that if it is, and if it found us, we would not survive the honesty of being truly seen.

What we forget — what is almost too good to believe — is how those encounters end.

Isaiah is undone, yes. And then a seraph touches his lips with a coal and declares him clean. Forgiven.

Peter falls at Jesus’s knees begging Him to leave, and Jesus says: don’t be afraid. Follow me.

Jacob limps away from the wrestling match — but he limps away with a new name and a blessing that will shape the destiny of a nation.

Paul is blinded on the road, but in three days his sight is restored and he becomes the most consequential missionary in human history.

Encounter exposes. But it does not discard. That is what is almost impossible to believe, and yet it is the consistent testimony of everyone who has actually experienced it.

VII. The Only Kind

So we come, finally, to what makes this encounter unlike any other.

The alien encounter films share a common structure: humanity encounters something beyond itself, and the encounter reveals humanity’s smallness, its vulnerability, its desperate need for something greater. Even the films that imagine benevolent contact tend to carry this undertone — we are not the most significant thing in the universe, and contact with something larger changes everything.

There is something in that longing that is not wrong. It is, in fact, deeply right. It is the intuition of a species that was made for more than itself, reaching for something it was designed to need.

But here is the difference between every imagined encounter and the real one: Every alien encounter story is ultimately about what we might learn, gain, or survive. The encounter is instrumental — it is meaningful because of what it produces, what technology it transfers, what salvation it offers, what destruction it threatens.

The encounter with God is not instrumental. It is personal.

It is not the encounter of a scientist with a phenomenon, or a species with a superior civilization. It is the encounter of a person with the One who made them and has known them and has loved them before they knew there was anyone to love. It is the encounter of someone who has been hiding, finally being found.

This is the only kind of encounter that tells the complete truth about us — and still draws us closer rather than pushing us away.

The bush burns and does not consume. That is the image. The holiness of God is not destructive to the person who approaches it honestly. It is purifying. The fire burns away what was never real, and what remains is something more genuinely itself than it was before.

This is what no alien encounter film can give you. Not because the filmmakers lack imagination, but because the thing they are reaching toward is not a thing at all. It is a Person. And persons are not encountered from a safe distance. They are encountered in proximity, in vulnerability, in the terrifying openness of actually being known.

The encounter that matters most is not a close encounter of the third kind. It is a close encounter of the only kind. The kind where the God of the universe interrupts an ordinary Tuesday, calls your name in the middle of your ordinary life, and stands there — quietly, unhurriedly, completely — waiting to see if you will turn aside and look.

Holy Ground Is Closer Than You Think

The world is very loud right now.

There are a thousand things competing for your attention — screens and feeds and crises and controversies, each one screaming that it is the most urgent thing, each one engineered to hold you a little longer, scroll a little more, stay a little further from the silence. And in the middle of all of it, somewhere on an ordinary hillside of an ordinary day, something is burning and not being consumed.

The question Moses faced is the same question available to us: Will we turn aside and look? Not scroll past. Not note it vaguely and return to our feed. Not save it for later, for a retreat, for the season when things settle down. Turn aside. Right now, in the middle of the ordinary. Pull back from the noise long enough to notice what has been burning beside you.

Maybe the bush has been burning all along. Maybe the real question is not whether God still speaks. Maybe the question is whether we still know how to be still enough to hear.

The ground beneath your feet may be holier than you know. The encounter you have been waiting for may not arrive with cinematic spectacle. It may not come with music or lighting or the emotional architecture of a well-designed experience. It may come quietly. In the middle of the dishes. On a road you have walked a hundred times. In a conversation you did not expect to matter. In the silence on the other side of the noise, if you stay there long enough to let it become something other than threatening.

And when it comes — when the Voice calls and the ordinary ground reveals itself as holy — the encounter will ask something of you. It will ask you to take off your shoes. It will ask you to stop pretending. It will ask you to be seen. And it will offer you, in return, the only thing that the searching has always been about: Not information. Not spectacle. Not the relief of having questions finally answered.

Presence. Actual, unhurried, completely honest presence. The close encounter of the only kind.