“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts…” – Isaiah 55:8-9
I’m charting a few thoughts while up in the air from Houston Hobby airport to Columbus, Ohio to visit family … especially our grandson Henry… whom I’ve not seen face to face since Christmas 2019. Covid theft. Covid remission. Covid recovery. Patience is a gift of the Spirit and distance clarifies many things as in 35,000 feet above sea level offers a level of seeing that helps usher in a different perspective about how things truly are… think mountain ranges, winding rivers and the Nazca lines of South America or the thousands of pyramids discovered in northern Africa by LiDAR technology hiding under the sand… or… the patchwork quilt like farms with fallow acres side by side full, lush plots of green growth as well as planned subdivisions’ twists and turns coupling the rooftops in a circuitous order or small towns with streets from all four directions meeting up at the town square…
Likewise… 35,000 days…about 95 years or even 35,000 minutes (24.3 days) later can offer up renewed perceptions of life… allowing stuff that might have been ‘up in the air’ to have been altered or completed or completely changed! Sometimes it’s less and most likely it’s more… as time and distance shape our daily routines along with the values and mores of any culture….
Some may think I’m way off base here but one of the goals of scripture and other holy writings is to help humanity keep its collective eyes on the ways of God and to place a lesser trust in the ways of humans… and this kind of thinking gets fleshed out in the knowledge that much of what we call the written words of God began totally in an oral form… the open ended stories that pointed out humanity’s relationship with itself along with the Creator and the Divine… lots of stories from the Bible told out loud over and over as a way to get at the daunting question in life, “now what?” as much of life can seem like what’s next is persistently ‘up in the air…’ and not from 35,000 feet above… but right there staring us in the face!
Its personal and pervasive. Always. Everyone gets to play and sometimes we even get to play together… and actually it’s better when we do…
Here are some examples of what I mean…
The man and the woman were evicted from the garden of God… as everyone hearing that story began to ask… ‘now what?’ including the man and the woman… or Jonah when he was told by God to tell the people of Nineveh to repent… he left for the opposite direction… only to be swallowed by a big fish… forcing Jonah to ask, ‘now what?’… but he finally did go and the Ninevites did repent and the end of the story is just one big everything’s still ‘up in the air’ saga… Go back and check it out!
Should I go on? What about David and Goliath? What do you think David or King Saul or the Israelite army was thinking when they watched Goliath fall to his death along with the Philistine army shouting in unison… ‘now what?’ See? So much of our lives are one story after another of connecting the ‘up in the air’ moments that people end up talking about at family reunions and at our funerals… and … again…the Bible is full of those kinds of moments so many of us relate to… Daniel in the lion’s den… or the time just before Jesus turned water into wine at the Cana wedding… or what the disciples faced at the news of Jesus’ empty tomb… all pushing the connection of ‘now what?’ and ‘up in the air!’ Faith matters!
So… now as we face the ‘up in the air’ chapter of an almost post-Covid life… unfolding in us in bits and pieces and short stories of our own… may we keep our hearts and minds on the ways of God… ways higher and so much better than our own!
