Michael Wright doesn't look like a terrorist.

Nevertheless, security guards nabbed this white-haired British engineer at the Las Vegas airport last year when travelers noticed him atop the parking garage studying the runway with binoculars. Wright explained he was simply a "plane spotter" -- an aviation lover who delights in jotting down aircraft registration numbers much like ornithologists scan the skies for birds to document in their Peterson's Field Guides.

Plane spotting, like its even more eccentric predecessor "train spotting," endures as a hobby among eccentric Brits and a handful of devotees from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Japan and the United States. It works like this: Perched high upon hotel rooftops, observation towers and parking garages, plane spotters search through binoculars straining to read the individual registration numbers printed on the tails of assorted aircraft. Then they record the numbers, attempting to chronicle as many sightings as possible.

Sound even less interesting than the search for a northern parula warbler? Plane-spotting enthusiasts claim the hobby is addictive, with the most fanatical spotters boasting of tens of thousands of sightings, all preserved for posterity in stacks of frayed journals.

Spotters endure infernal abuse from co-workers and family members. But suggestions of daffiness are tame, though, compared to accusations of espionage. Late last year, authorities arrested several British and Dutch citizens when they attempted to enjoy their offbeat pursuits too close to a military air show in southeastern Greece. The plane spotters were released just before Christmas after British diplomats intervened on their behalf, explaining that, yes, this was an odd but harmless hobby.

Before his brush with the law in Las Vegas, Michael Wright joined a group of plane spotters on a tour to Paris organized by Aeroprints, Ltd., plane-spotting specialists based in Hampshire, England. Before you could yell "Road trip!" 21 men piled on a chartered bus at Heathrow Airport and headed toward Paris' Le Bourget airfield, where Charles Lindbergh made his historic landing in 1927. With the giddiness of a busload of rock star groupies collecting autographs, they clamored together right up alongside the runway, and with binoculars in hand, they strained to catch a glimpse of new numbers and models to record in their collectors' notebooks.

It seems they stood too close to the runway for comfort. Almost immediately, security personnel, armed with automatic weapons, of course, pulled up in a white van only to hear this band of odd but innocent men explain this most curious of leisure activities. "C'est bizarre," a baffled police officer said as he drove away, leaving them to continue their strange pursuits.

Life is hard for plane spotters these days. Ordinary people, newly aware of living in terror, simply cannot afford to ignore those who suspiciously stare up toward the heavens. Do they mean us harm? Do they really spot something going on up there? Or are they simply odd?

Paul writes that life is hard for God spotters, too. Disaster, adversity, misfortune -- it all makes it tough for us to spot God through the fog of chaos and profound sorrow.

Paul reminds us that there is nothing new about living in the throes of terror and disaster. Hardship? Distress? Persecution? Famine? Nakedness? Peril? Sword? Nothing new there.

Nothing new about crying for divine help, either, as we weakly plug along. But while we search for meaning, God searches the human heart. God controls not only the air traffic. God even controls the moving of the Spirit.

Nothing new about God spotting either. This age-old practice occupies a long and curious history.

While plane spotters lug around their own accounts of sightings in notebooks as thick as Bibles, God spotters carry the real thing filled with the accounts of generations of the God spotters who came before them.

* Moses spotted God in a burning bush.
* Hannah spotted God through her tears at Shiloh as she begged for a child in the face of infertility.
* Isaiah spotted God in a vision sitting on a throne surrounded by six-winged seraphs.
* Elijah spotted God in the cleft of a mountain amid thunder, lightning, wind and fire.
* Bartimaeus, though blind, spotted God from his place along the road.
* A woman in need of healing spotted God in the crowd around Jesus.
* The centurian at the cross spotted God when Jesus died in suffering and agony.
* The thief spotted God as he hung on a cross beside Jesus.
* King Nebuchadnezzar spotted God in the fiery furnace.

And still others spotted God calming a storm, healing a leper, restoring a young girl to life. Matthew tells us that a whole crowd of people spotted God talking about mustard seeds and hidden treasure and nets teeming with fish as Jesus was sitting in a boat teaching those who had gathered on the beach.

Yet it often remains hard for us to see God in the existential realities of our lives. In fact, sometimes it seems that God has gone into hiding, that he is deliberately avoiding us. The poet Edward Dowden expresses this in "Deus Absconditus." Since God seems to have fled the scene, he muses, I will chase after him. And so he does. But his search turns up nothing. Finally, he gives up. God, apparently, will not be found. So the poet concludes, "If still thou claimst me, seek me. I am here." Even Luther and Pascal thought of God as the "hidden God," hiding from the sin of his people. To perceive such a God required, they thought, an enormous act of faith, possible only through the gift of grace available to only a few.

Even the psalmist David pondered the problem of Deus Absconditus. "My tears have been my food day and night, while people sat to me continually, 'Where is your God?"' (Psalm 42:3).

Today, in the face of so much horror, many people no longer wonder "Where is thy God?" Instead, like the Dowden, they give up, thinking God is either long gone, or that indeed, there is no God at all.

Those who argue that there is no God may simply be saying that in their experience they have yet to run across anything that even remotely resembles the activity of God. Certainly they did not see God in the Holocaust, or in the famines throughout the Third World, or in the suffering of children, or in the events of 9/11, for example.

But this begs the question of what sort of thing would we recognize as the presence of God?

The apostle Paul affirms that God is present, not hidden, and that nothing will separate us from his love. If we accept that as a given, then perhaps God is not so hard to spot after all. But we must be open and receptive to the possibility -- that God is among us. Then we'll see God in even the smallest of wonders.

The church's business is God spotting. Church offers opportunities for fine-tuning our God-spotting abilities. Those who love God, those called according to God's purpose, learn new ways to spot the good even in the midst of pain.

The greater truth is that God has already spotted us. Long ago, God spotted us from afar and through Jesus came as close as possible to join us where we were standing so that we might catch the most close-range, intimate sighting possible.

If God was willing to send Jesus to the very place where we were standing, to the very place where many were already looking up in hopes of seeing something interesting, then won't God continue to give us all the sightings we really need?

Today God is spotted everywhere: in the lives of those whose hardships are crushing, whose distress induces nightmares, whose persecution horrifies, whose famine shames us, whose nakedness embarrasses us, whose peril makes us want to turn away, whose relationship with the sword is too close for us to relate. Not only do such tragedies fail to separate us from God; God can actually be spotted in the midst of them. Nothing can keep us from God's love.