When The Seer Does NoT See

One summer morning in 2017, I woke up convinced I was meant to be a football referee.

This might sound reasonable, considering I am a football fan. But the truth is, I was a slightly overweight vicar with little time on my hands and no previous interest in being an authority on the football pitch (that's soccer to those on the other side!).

Rachel, my wife, was bemused but supportive. She gently pointed out that referees receive a fair amount of abuse, and my free time at weekends was not exactly abundant.

But I forged ahead, convinced I was going to become the best vicar-referee the world, or at least England, had ever seen.

I signed up with the local FA. I wasn’t even deterred when I arrived at my first day of training to find a group of young adults in tracksuits, looking at this middle-aged vicar rather curiously.

Somehow, I passed and took charge of my first match.

It did not go well.

I missed bad tackles. Tempers rose quickly, culminating in an enormous fight just before halftime. Rachel, who had seen it coming, had taken the children off before then.

At the end, the coach came over and said:

“Thanks for the effort, but you are the worst referee we have ever had.”

That was the end of my refereeing career.

What has stayed with me ever since is how convinced I was that I was destined for this, while my wife calmly remained unconvinced … but right.

It has also helped me make sense of one of the most bizarre moments in Scripture when a donkey speaks.

Seriously.

For years, I skimmed straight past it.

It felt a bit odd, slightly out of place, so I did what many of us do when something doesn’t quite fit.

I ignored it.

The talking donkey was quietly filed away as one of those “Bible things” you don’t dwell on too much.

But eventually, I went back to the story, and I realised something I hadn’t noticed before.

The talking donkey isn’t the strangest part.

The Story We Think We Know

The story appears in the book of Numbers. Balaam is a kind of prophet-for-hire, someone known for having access to the divine. Kings call on him to bless or curse nations, and his words carry real weight. Not a bad job, all things considered.

At this point, he’s been summoned by a king who wants him to curse Israel. Balaam sets off on the journey with a sense of purpose, seemingly confident that he knows what he’s doing and where he’s heading.

And then something unexpected begins to happen.

His donkey stops.

There’s no obvious reason for it. No visible obstacle. It simply refuses to move forward. Balaam tries to get it going again, but the donkey resists. It veers off the path, presses against a wall, and eventually lies down altogether.

Each time, Balaam responds as many of us might. What begins as frustration quickly turns into anger, and then into force. From his perspective, this is a stubborn animal getting in the way of something important.

What he doesn’t realise is that there is an angel standing in the road ahead of him, blocking the way with a drawn sword.

And Balaam just cannot see it.

The Detail Everyone Skips

The donkey can.

Three times, the donkey reacts to something Balaam is completely blind to. Three times, it attempts to stop him from continuing down a path he is so sure he should be on.

Then comes the moment that feels almost too strange to take seriously. The donkey speaks.

Not in riddles or in some heightened, mystical language, but plainly and directly: “Why are you beating me?”

What’s perhaps just as curious is that Balaam responds as if this is a perfectly normal exchange. The story doesn’t pause to explain it or soften it. It simply carries on.

It is such an unusual detail that it can easily distract from what is really happening. Perhaps that is why so many of us move past it quickly. But when you slow down and sit with it, the story begins to shift in a different direction.

The only one who sees clearly is not the prophet.

When Certainty Becomes a Blind Spot

Balaam is not inexperienced or naïve. He is someone who is expected to see, to discern, to understand what God is doing.

That is what makes this moment feel so uncomfortable.

The one who is meant to perceive what is happening is, in this instance, completely unaware of the reality directly in front of him. It is not that nothing is there, nor that God is absent. It is that Balaam is so certain of the path he is on that he cannot recognise anything that challenges it.

He continues forward, interpreting every interruption as something to overcome rather than something to attend to.

It raises a quiet but unsettling question about the nature of certainty itself. Sometimes it is not ignorance that blinds us, but confidence. The more convinced we are that we are right, the less likely we are to notice when something is trying to tell us otherwise.

I’ve Been There More Than I’d Like to Admit

This was how I felt about becoming England’s best vicar-referee.

Confident.

It was confidence that led me from the idea to full training and to officiating at an adult game. I knew what I was doing, or at least I thought I did.

Looking back, those are often the moments where I have missed something important — a warning that didn’t quite register, or a nudge I dismissed because it didn’t align with where I had already decided I was going.

I treated them as obstacles to overcome and ignored Rachel’s gentle warnings.

Moments are rarely that dramatic. There are no visible angels standing in the road ahead. Instead, they come in subtler ways, disruptions, hesitations, or a quiet sense that something isn’t quite right.

And yet, those small things can carry more meaning than we realise at the time.

The Problem Isn’t That Nothing Is There

We often speak about faith in terms of absence. God feels distant. Silent. Difficult to hear.

And at times, that is a very real experience.

But this story offers another possibility. What if the issue is not that nothing is there, but that we are not noticing what is?

Balaam is not lacking direction. In a sense, he is surrounded by it. His path is being interrupted, slowed, even blocked. Yet he interprets all of this as inconvenience rather than guidance.

That distinction matters.

It suggests that what we experience as obstacles may, at times, be invitations to pause. What feels like resistance may actually be protection. And what appears to be getting in the way could, in fact, be trying to show us something we have not yet seen.

The Donkey We Ignore

I used to skip past the donkey because it felt ridiculous.

Now I am not so sure.

Within the story, the donkey represents something easily overlooked, the kind of thing we do not expect to carry meaning or insight. It is not dramatic or impressive. It does not fit neatly into how we imagine guidance should appear.

And so it is easy to dismiss.

But the longer I sit with the story, the more I wonder whether that is precisely the point. The strange interruption, the delay, the unexpected voice — these are often the very things we are quickest to ignore.

Yet they may be the very places where something important is being revealed.

A Slightly Uncomfortable Ending

The story does not conclude with Balaam demonstrating newfound wisdom or writing a reflective article about what he has learned.

Instead, his eyes are opened.

Only then does he see what has been there all along: the angel, the danger, the reality he had been moving towards without recognising it.

It is a moment of clarity, but one that arrives after the fact — very much like my own rather brief refereeing career.

Which is often how clarity works.

So, Where Does That Leave Us?

The talking donkey is still a strange detail. I suspect it always will be.

But it no longer feels like the most unusual part of the story.

What feels far more striking is how easy it is to be convinced we are seeing clearly while missing what is directly in front of us. Not just in moments like mine that summer, but in the wider course of our lives.

It raises a quieter question.

Are we actually paying attention?

The issue is not always that God is silent or absent, but that we have already decided what we expect to hear.

And that expectation can quietly shape what we are able to see.

Sometimes the problem is not that nothing is being said.

It is that we have already made up our minds, and so we miss what is right in front of us.