The immutability of God appears in its most perfect beauty when viewed against the mutability of men. In God no change is possible; in men change is impossible to escape. Neither the man is fixed nor his world, and he and it are in constant flux.
~A. W. Tozer (1897-1963)
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the Founder and Perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against Himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons.
~ From Hebrews 12
There are moments beloved…
We know Him, and we live in His sweet Presence. We don’t ever intend to leave. We don’t even want to.
And yet, there are those moments where we seem to get snagged on a moment. There is this thought that perhaps the vehicle we are in is not quite nice enough. Or perhaps it would just make more sense to have a nicer something or other. And so very quickly, these thoughts begin to spin up in our minds.
Surely, we have had practice in years past when we lived in time – this time – rather than eternity. We wanted and grabbed and wished and stole and desired and devoured and were never really full – even though we continually stuffed ourselves with anything that we thought might fill the aching corners of the G_d-shaped hole in our soul.
He has set us free from this. And we know, really know this is true. And there are now ever-larger and vaster stretches of the moment of a now everlasting life wherein we simply worship Him with our breath and life and actions and thoughts and eyes. And any-thing simply does not really even interest us. For He becomes our passion and our Life and our very Love. And it is in this passion and Life and Love that we become empowered to love the life He has given us and become relevant enough to the world so as to finally, actually, really love others and make a difference in this place.
And even so, we are so easily entangled in the world. For the dimensions in which we live are real – and they are the only dimensions we can see and feel with the body and mind with which He has provided us. And herein lies both the problem and the solution. We are not just a mind and a body any more. We are fully alive. Our spirit is now fully alive in Him. And in this new Life, we are able to truly sense that life is way more than just the 4-dimensional box we perceive with our five (or even six) senses.
Can we see it?
We can now set our eyes on Him. This is not just true in some amorphous, metaphorical sense. No, we are really able to see Him. We are able, in our spirit, to gaze out from ourselves towards Him with a lens that is both unflinchingly in-focus and eternal. And it is in this setting our eyes on Him that we see this life is but some passing phase – a wave (albeit rough) – through which we are passing. And while there is the wave, we now know that on the backside of this wave is an endless ocean of Calm Sea.
We are just passing through.
We can hold on.
We can hold on to the One we never wanted to let go of anyway. For He is simply more beautiful than the curve of that new car, or that body, or that investment, or that something or whatever or other we thought we wanted as it tried to snag us along the way.
And the snag breaks away, unable to find purchase along the curves of a newly created spiritual being. We are whole in Him. And neither are there any breaches in the armor with which He clothes us. We are just passing through the wave.
We are almost home.
