FOG

Normally when I look out my kitchen window in the morning, I see rolling green hills, white fence posts standing sentinel on the far edge of our property, cars passing on the highway beyond. I see all the way to the distant tree line on Mrs. Mabel's farm across the road. Sometimes I see deer, in our field or in Mrs. Mabel's. Or cows next door at Mrs. Jean's farm, black dots on the grassy pasture lining the highway just east of us. I see Jackie's roosters strutting about her yard, way up at the end of our long driveway. I see Grammy and Granddad's house, next door, and check their driveway to see if Granddad has left yet to go have morning coffee with the old men at Autry's.

Today, on this particular morning, a thick white fog pushed right up to the house, obscuring everything but the front porch and the scrawny maple sapling just outside my kitchen window. No fields. No fence. No highway. No cows or deer or roosters. No next door neighbors. Nothing but shifting, misty white.

Of course, all the big wide world was still out there. The high blue sky. The far green fields. The distant trees, painted orange and brown and yellow. The cows and the traffic and the million lives that stretch from here to the other side of the globe. It was all still out there, but I just couldn't see it. I knew the world was out there, waiting, and I knew that as the sun crept higher in the sky, minute by minute, it would slowly burn off the fog and open once again a view that stretched to the horizon.

Something about the fog makes you look. Makes you strain your eyes to see further, to see more, to bring the vague shadows lurking in the mist into sharper focus. It's like waking up with brand new eyes. Like seeing for the first time things that just yesterday had been old and familiar, and thus overlooked or taken for granted.

I can't help but think this is something like the faith journey we are on. Today, I discover anew an implication of God's grace, an aspect of His holiness, the surety of His faithfulness...something I saw so clearly just yesterday or last week or last month, but then forgot about or overlooked because it seemed so close and so familiar. Like waking from a misty haze, my heart eyes are straining to see better, to see more clearly, to see further.

And as this spiritual haze lifts, burned away by the brilliance of the the Son Himself, I realize that there are far horizons that I have yet to discover. Beyond my green pasture, another farm, another family. Beyond that, a continent of souls. Beyond that, faces and languages and customs that I can't even imagine. There is so much more to discover about God's holiness, about the gospel of Christ, about the power and influence of the Holy Spirit. And over all of that vast expanse, near and far, the Spirit of God, moving and working and dispelling the fog.

Thank you, Father, for the fog, and the rising sun, and the dissipating mist. Thank you for clouding my vision so that I can learn to see with new eyes. Thank you, Father, for the hope and the assurance that one day, these eyes will see all the way to Glory.