On the road making pastoral calls today, I took in the astounding beauty of a sun-filled April day. The temperature is in the 70's and the trees are putting on their buds and early leaves. Hen-bit, the purple flowers (weeds) which appear in barren fields in early Spring, is making an entrance worthy of a Diva and the wildflowers are pushing through the roadsides with their color and radiance.
Along the way, I drove through a creek bottom which afforded me a view of multiple hills and valleys along the route of the water. It is a visage that is rarely seen in that particular area of the country because of the dense foliage normally found in that vicinity yet, today, maybe because of the high winds, maybe because I was paying more attention than usual, you could see the texture, the topography, the dimensions of the earth as the waters coursed through the cleavage of the hills. Somewhere in those moments of wonderment it occurred to me that many, if not most, people live very linear lives in a multi-dimensional world.
The landscape around us does not change dramatically through the years. The hills are hills, the valleys are valleys, the plains are plains, and the rivers and streams are rivers and streams. Yet, for most, the world around us, our context, is lived, even driven through, in a very linear fashion. The world is where we are. The world is what we experience. The world is what we see. The world is what we remember. The world is what we believe. The world is how we order it. Yet, before us and after us, often in spite of us, the real world, God's world, is so much more. So much more.
God's world has ridges, crooks, and corners. God's world has peaks which are higher than we can imagine and deeper than we could survive seeing. God's world has colors Crayola has never been able to duplicate. God's world splashes barrenness with unexpected glory and brings forth life from those places regarded as forgotten. God's world has grays and hues of uncertainty. God's world has enough for all if we are willing to go far enough to find it. God's world is multi-dimensional and, still, God allows linear beings to dwell there. God's world is a paradox of competing truths and wildly spun visions of co-existence that is ours to experience, if ever we dare off the beaten path of linear behaviors.
'Purchase our vision of the world and be this . . .', 'Own our understanding of the world and you will do that . . .', and the list goes on and on. The politicians each hawk their linear party-line agendas, even as religious traditions parochialize linear behaviors in the pew and beyond the front door. Advertisement firms pound the reading and viewing public with linear thinking 'that sells', while home security firms drive home linear fear that motivates subscriptions.
Is it a wonder that, in the raw unexpected moment of multi-dimensional experience, the uncomplicated splendor leads to cataclysmic awe and worship?
Take a moment for a walk or a drive, sit at your window and look across the yard or the street at the wave of tree limbs in the breeze, shut your eyes and remember the laughter of soaring through space on the seat of a swing, or touch the soft cheek of a baby's face . . . and give thanks to God for dimensions of being our harried living barely acknowledges. Then spend a little more time there each day. Who knows? Maybe in the grace of walking through life with the eyes of Christ we will discover, with the women at the tomb that first Easter morning, why the linear laws of death no longer apply, as we ponder the multi-dimensional aspects of the stone rolled away.
Your servant in Christ,
Pastor Don
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