he who has eyes...

“What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?” [Matthew 16:26]

As the sun rose this morning, I saw something wonderful.

There is a smokestack not far from my window that was doing its thing and adding to our global dilemma.  And the stacks upon stacks climbed higher and higher, slowly becoming an invisible part of our atmosphere.  But this morning, the colors of this steam were something else entirely.  It’s said that our sunrises wouldn’t nearly be as magnificent if not for the pollution in the air, so it is no surprise that the colors in pollution itself were nothing short of brilliant.

There was this deep, indescribable blue that itself was striking when compared to the blue of the sky behind it.  This shade was juxtaposed against a bright pink on the illuminated side — that color that causes you to take an extra breath when viewing a sunset.  These colors, so strikingly different, look absolutely glorious when side-by-side.

Now, before the sun rose, this steam appeared as only a muted gray.  There was nothing to it at all.  Without the sun striking it, it wouldn’t ever produce anything quite so beautiful.  In fact, without the sun, it would be nothing but hideous, because it would be only a reminder of what is wrong with this world and how we treat it and nothing more.  But, with illumination it is, fittingly, illuminated.

We as humans have this dual nature as well.  And, I’m not just talking about sin and our connection to God.  It’s something deeper than that.

There is a life we lead, the one that causes us to not even realize that the question, “How is it going?” is actually a question.  We often dismiss it with a brief “fine” or “good” or even “same as it always is.”  How tragic it is that we don’t usually get the chance to answer, “Oh you should’ve seen the sunrise this morning — it really pointed to the Divine.”  Or, “I feel part of something greater than myself, and am truly blessed to have any sort of part in making it come to fruition.”  No, because our lives are ordinary and routine and we have lost any sense of wanting anything more, we quell any desire in our heart — maybe so that we don’t feel the pain of having that desire go unrealized.

John Eldredge says in his book Desire:

Something awful has happened; something terrible.  Something worse, even, than the fall of man.  For in that greatest of all tragedies, we merely lost Paradise — and with it, everything that made life worth living.  What has happened since is unthinkable: we’ve gotten used to it.

He goes on to talk about how we, as humans, have been made for something more than we’re currently experiencing.  We are made for perfection and to strive to seek Paradise and to connect with God in a way that only the deepest desires of our hearts can explain to us.

I mean, the revelation of Scripture is infinitely valuable, but what good is it if there is no personal entity within us that makes us connect with this revelation?  If you were to read only the words of the Bible, it wouldn’t be life-changing.  It’s the things that it invokes in you, that it calls out of you, that it calls you to do that make it life-changing.  And all these things are colored by the lens of our interpretation, which is deeply seeded in our desires.

These desires are not something to be pushed aside is some sort of ascetic, all-physical-is-bad sort of way.  They are to be embraced, because there is a reason that they are there in the first place.  When they are embraced and focused on God and who God made you to be, they lead only to life — and life in the fullest.

This year, I am planning on reading Eldredge’s book over and over again.  I feel that its message is something that my soul really needs because, truth be told, my life is not one that people would usually see desire in.  I’d rather not waste my life by letting it slip by without noticing.

I want so deeply to remember that we are not simply the mundane, muted gray of the pollution of our souls.  More, that desire in us isn’t simply causing the air to get thicker so that we can’t quite see the sunrise through its fog.  No, there is beauty even in us and that beauty has the potential to make the sunrises even more magnificent.  And our desires, when properly illuminated, yield something so glorious that they cause us to pause in the morning and actually reflect on the day.