“Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
In some odd way, our lives are always getting interrupted by God, and it can happen a lot. When will we ever learn to see the invisible? When we finally do, it can be quite amazing. Our night sky here in Alaska is wonderful. I see stars that others in the lower 48 can’t, and the northern lights here can be pretty awesome.
But probably the most phenomenal night skies were in Mexico while camping on the beach. As I lay there on the sand I looked to see the Milky Way on full display. It really was as good as it could be. It seemed there were 100 times more stars than ever before.
But as I laid on the beach I gazed up, and a weird surge of fear gripped me.
I started to panic then–I was trembling and shaking. I got up and ran to our tent. I just couldn’t handle the incredible universe with no buffer. I was completely undone and reduced to a quivering speck of dust. I tried to tell my wife Lynn what had just happened to me, but I couldn’t. I was too scrambled. I couldn’t speak.
I realize now what I had experienced was “awe.”
It was a word used commonly a few generations ago. There seems to be a kind of existential crisis which we side-step in this perspective in these more modern times. We rarely contemplate the night sky. We seldom, if ever, have seen fire in a bush.
It seems we have traded our awareness of an authentically Almighty God, and in turn, we get to pick all blackberries we can haul. We reason it out and feel we have made a better bargain. But when we extricate this from our souls, don’t be surprised if we suddenly find that we have become spiritual paupers. (Perhaps that is necessary? I don’t know.)
Maybe we should learn to see those things that are invisible.
Each of us has the opportunity now to see the spiritual world that swirls around us. Why wait for heaven? Ask the Father to reveal His glory right now in this present moment. Learn to see that which can’t be seen by our eyes, but must be seen only through the optics of our faith.
And after all, only faith can breakdown our ignorant illusions, it’s “the conviction of things not seen.”
“The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And the expanse [of heaven] is declaring the work of His hands.”
Psalms 19:1, Amplified
Broken Believers 