I want to live in this world of vanity without being part of the vanity, but I just can't. No matter how patient I think I am, no matter how hard I try, I deceive myself when I think I am beginning to understand God, someone else, even myself.
At night I can look out our bedroom window and see a few stars. I can wait patiently, strain and focus to see more, but with little success. I can take this same old body and these same old near sighted eyes a few miles down the road and guess what? Where the lights are not so bright I can see more stars.
My attitude is like that. No matter how hard I apply myself; being positive in the midst of pain and turmoil, saying the right thing, doing the right thing, sometimes it just isn't enough. There is nothing I can do in that blink of time, in that situation, with that person, with my own pain and sorrow except to accept it, acknowledge it, live it.
I can't make it go away. Burying it or running from it will only make it fester and reappear later. Sometimes I just have to be there until I can move on, maybe to a different place where I can see the stars again.
I like trees, you like trees, most of us like trees. Did you know we live between the trees? This thing called life, our journey is from one tree to another. I believe one tree is in Genesis and the other is in Revelation. You and I and everyone else are some kind of animation that is moving from one tree to the other. Most of us call this history, the story of our journey between the trees.
As long as we are a part of this journey, all of our speculations about what was before the first tree or what is after the last tree are just that, speculations. Alas, I'm sorry, but science is on this journey too. Science changes just as much as we do.
We can learn a lot, if we'll stop, when we stop, to consider how we've changed. We all do you know. We change where we live, who we like and yes, even what we believe. The things that make us laugh change. The things that make us cry change. We understand the seasons, why don't we understand change? Why don't we learn from change? Why don't we learn from history?
The Bible says that even those who have died ask the Lord, how much longer. That means that those who have been, those who are, and those who will be, are all together between the trees. Apparently even death waits for the journey to end. I like that.
How is it that amidst all of this constant change God's word does not change? Certainly we change how we understand it. We use it to separate ourselves from each other. We beat each other over the head with it. We laugh at it and call it nonsense. We die, but it continues.
Each new generation tries, but inevitably, is powerless to destroy it. Once it was even nailed to a tree, but even death was powerless to hold it. Maybe God's word is here to help us learn to live in vanity, without being part of the vanity.
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