BitterSweetLife

After I spent the summer stabilizing our checking account, sweating in the sun, Lindsay agreed that I was justified in buying a new pair of sunglasses. Kind of a token acknowledgment of my efforts. So I found the pair I wanted online and successfully stalked them on eBay.

They arrived with a set of alternative orange lenses, which I quickly swapped in for the standard browns. Then I walked outside and noticed that the world had changed, was glowing. Leaves and grass were radiant, near-neon green. The sky was shimmering azure. Sunlight pooled and splashed like liquid fire. Earth was a brighter and potentially better place.

I wanted to take a picture, but that would have meant cramming my camera behind my sunglasses, which could have compromised my nasal cavity. So I’m left with the next-best thing, a kind of Photoshop approximation of the glowing world my glasses revealed.

So far, only Lindsay, Aidan, and myself, have actually seen this startling secret.

I’ve begun to wonder if these sunglasses, which are clearly a mutant, one-of-a-kind pair (they probably fell into a vat of foaming, experimental acid in the factory) might be a window into the world as God sees it. Or the world as it will be.

Maybe the aptly-named Spy glasses give the owner a glimpse into the future. Or maybe the glasses perceive the promises woven into earth, the prophetic end to which all things are tending—an end-times, urban-Edenic radiance.

My sunglasses reveal some of the light configurations, but I wonder what the new heaven and earth will look like, all told. I wonder if Jesus sees the world as dark and crumbling, or brilliant and already redeemed, or both. I wonder how long we have left before, in a flat second, everything dark ends and we’re made strong enough to live in the heavy, vivid, bright new world.