BitterSweetLife

One morning I was watching a sunrise, the sun fighting heroically to break through clouds. The streamers of filtered luminescence were glorious—but they were streamers only—and it struck me: partial knowledge, like clouded light, has a bittersweet tang to it.

Human beings, when entrusted with divine revelation, have so many ways of going wrong. Like a hazy sunrise, the radiant truth of Christ suffers from disruptive intervention. Consider the many stages of distortion:

1) Truth delivered, but not heard—like a letter stuck on the mantle and forgotten.
2) Truth heard, but not comprehended—like a comment taken out of context.
3) Truth comprehended, but not applied—like an practicing sports therapist who’s overweight.
4) Truth applied, but not in balance—like a child slapping Band-Aids on a head wound. And each discontinuity has its nuances… So many ways the message can go wrong.

Like the genesis of a dawn, God’s words invite a shift of focus. But he reveals redemption in a kind of messy way. There’s a raggedness to it, and we tend to focus on the rough edges rather than what’s about to break through. We could, if we tried, peer through the haze, and make out the shining heavenly body. Instead, we comment on the cloud cover—are they cirrus or cumulous, and is it going to rain?

If only we learned to track the scattered fragments of glory, we would learn to see the perfect whole they represent. The splintered pieces are not enough to live on; they only point to the unified, breathtaking totality of GOD. Often, we settle for the fragments. Truth eludes us, and this makes reality, when it’s received, perceived, grasped, and integrated wisely—the most precious commodity one can possess.

On another morning I could be reminded, watching the sun rise imperiously in a clear sky, that the unveiling of glory will not always be so tattered. One day we’ll stand on the other side of a great divide—the current gap between the truth and our perception. (1 Corinthians 13:9-10, The Bible)

But for now, this is how Christ enters a foundering world: He calls us to study streamers of dawn in the eastern sky, a growing brightness. Light swirls through clouds, preeminent, though partially hidden. Our job is to look closely.

These days, hindsight has a way of clarifying what was presently confusing…but thunderheads still churn. We are still readily distracted from the unseen heart of things, struggling daily to see. Our lives have ragged edges.

We struggle to find Christ’s glory revealed in the midst of fragmentation and disorder—Christ in the storm, walking on the water as we, like the disciples, cringe and cry for their lives—divine power “loose” in a vortex of confusion, something perhaps hard to see. But something that shakes us, releases us, when we see it.