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Wednesday, September 15, 2010

In Between




Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees takes off his shoes. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

On the cusp of dawn, leaving the night behind, but not quite daybreak.
The in between.
Mysterious. Dark and light mingled and entwined and, for a few brief moments, inseparable.
Wide awake during the in between, praying, thinking, I strangely had a flashback to college.
Religion 101. Junior year--yes I realize that is late in a college career to take a general course and the registrar and prof were not happy with me, but I was and still am of the opinion that the point of a liberal arts education is to have a diverse, balanced course of study all the way through school...ok, sorry about that...stepping off my soap box now and back to the blog... Religion 101...junior...oh yeah...
Willis P. De Boer. Close to retirement, lanky with what I thought at the time were unusually long appendages (now I know that it's just part of being Dutch) and a slight brogue, he gestured with those far reaching fingers and said we were the in "the already but the not yet".
The already but the not yet.
The in between.
Like seeing a mountain range far off we recognize the majesty and vastness, but don't really begin to understand their scope until we travel into them. The view is different from the foothills to the passes to the mountain tops to the high plateaus. Discovery is around every corner and rarely looks the way we expected it to.
When Jesus came to earth, He ushered in God's Eternal Kingdom. It's already here. But as is painfully obvious, the fulfillment of that Kingdom seems forever in the future with, at times, little evidence of its existence. For the past 2000 years we, the human race, have been journeying through the mountains of the already but the not yet.
Oh, we're in awe of the beauty and rugged delicacy. But we're fickle people and even the majesty of the mountains becomes mundane and all we see are the rocks and foot falls. Sometimes we're fearful that any misstep could lead to disaster. Not always aware that what we're in is so much bigger than us, we continue on.
I know I've felt lost in the mountains...in the in between. Caught in the middle...wanting desperately to get through or at least to a peak so I can get a bigger view and maybe see how much farther there is to go. Caught. Between night and day.
But then there are those moments, when beauty or art or music or communion with loved ones, or acts of kindness and generosity, or the realization of sacrifice transcends what we can grasp and is something felt not thought, and we get a glimpse of the already but the not yet. Signs of the coming dawn.
Life in the in between.

***forgive mixing metaphors and being a bit melodramatic...remember I wrote it in the wee hours and after reading Bronte.***

3 comments:

tierney said...

So beautiful. Thanks for starting my day with this. :)

Chris Godfredsen said...

Or when you saunter over to a blog that you haven't made time for in a while...

A breathtaking look from the in between.

This is not my home, a fact which I rejoice in!

janelle said...

Beautiful...sometimes I need to be reminded to look for and enjoy the in between. Thanks for that today.