But there are other days when something pulls us from the routine and for a moment we catch a glimpse of a bigger picture.
Often these reflections are inspiring. But sometimes the corresponding thoughts are confusing or even worse cause life to feel meaningless in that moment.
For example: Why go to college, get married, and buy a house on the lake so your kids can spend happy summer days by the shore, if later in life you will retire and your children will move on to their own homes?
What is the point of life, specifically as time slips by and generations change?
The stories of the Bible offers hope and the promise of something bigger and greater in the universe but that something can still be hard to understand.
Perhaps it is because we still live in the fog. We don't see clearly yet.
Paul says it this way, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am fully known." 1 Cor 13:12
Perhaps it's like a young boy growing up in a tiny town deep in the marshlands and full of miasma. He has never left home, but on the clearest of days he can catch sight of an incredible mansion perfectly situated on the green hillside outside the village.
Somehow he knows that the mansion and surrounding lands are good and beautiful; perfect beyond his imagination, but because he can't yet cross the wide swamp between his home and the hills beyond it, he doesn't know what the great hallways look like or how the green pastures feel beneath his feet. He can't explore the grand rooms or run through the grounds in search of fireflies.
The boy longs to escape the poisonous air of his homeland for instinctively he knows that his very survival depends on it. But he doesn't know exactly what to expect once he does leave.
Like the boy, we long for as many glimpses of that mansion as we can handle, but there may be things about it that we will not understand until we get there. Things that in our mortal state, we can not understand.
So for now, may we know Way home, trust the Truth of how to get there, and find deep hope and purpose in Life eternal.
The mansion waits. The fireflies glow. One day the fog will lift.
Let us hold fast to our hope.
