Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Evidence for the Taking

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I wasn’t going to run yesterday.  I plunged into my morning work, and when I came up for air at noon, I was startled by the brilliance outside.  I couldn’t put on my running clothes fast enough.  I cast aside long tights and my fleece jacket for the first time in almost five months, and dug out my shorts, sleeveless top and sunglasses.  It was that warm.  As I headed down the sidewalk, the internal i-pod of my brain kept playing over and over U2’s song, “Beautiful Day.”  Indeed.  Like the crocuses just peeping through the winter’s remains, we emerged from the endless shroud of gray damp days into what appeared to be a different dimension, God’s glory over all the earth, there all along in a way which we could not comprehend before, now evident by the radiance of the sun, mild breezes warming my skin, and kids playing with scooters on the sidewalk.  I saw two grown men shooting hoops in the middle of the day.  Mothers were pushing strollers, and preschoolers on the playground shrieked with quantum joy as if just released from hibernation. 

It was a perfectly drawn picture of restoration, the depth of color as thick as oil paint applied with a trowel, its richness on a level of impossibility, the world and everything in it drinking in the breath of God and teeming with new life.   I was so distracted that I ran past the intersection where I needed to turn.  And laughed out loud when I realized it.

Somehow we know that this is the way it is supposed to be.   No randomness here.  The world has been revived, brought back to life, just like always, one season following another.  And through a day so blue and gentle, God gently reminds us who He is.

 

Have you not known?  Have you not heard?

The LORD is the everlasting God,

the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He does not faint or grow weary,

His understanding is unsearchable.

                           Isaiah 40.28

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