But how could God possibly live on earth with people? If heaven, even the highest heaven, can’t contain you, how can this temple that I have built contain you? Lord, my God, listen to your servant’s prayer and request, and hear the cry and prayer that I your servant pray to you.

2 Chronicles 6:18-19

Late Friday evening, walking Max after a deliciously cool mid-May day, I came toward the crest of a rise and witnessed a beautiful science lesson when the lights of an oncoming car illuminated the water vapor rising from the road.

Looking around, the night appeared clear and the sky held no threat of rain, but the air just above the surface was evidently saturated, and although the car was below my horizon the light from its headlamps revealed what my eyes could not otherwise perceive.

It reminded me that quite often – in fact probably all the time – there are deep truths about moment by moment life that reside just beyond my perception; things as substantial and as real as anything that is obvious; principles and laws and facts that I am not equipped to observe; knowledge both cosmic and microscopic, temporal and eternal, knowable and unknowable.

This both excites and frustrates me at the same time. The very fact of the narrow scope of my understanding points toward so much more. Yet I no more have the capacity to process eternal truths than I have to read my way through the Library of Congress! And so much more than that, because the sum of written knowledge is finite, and the infinite fulness of God is something I cannot even begin to imagine.

So – and this is my prayer: “Gracious God, sometimes I approach the crest of a rise and – unexpectedly – a flood of light (from a source I cannot see) teaches me some unconsidered truth. May the depths of your love, the light of your mercy, and the beauty of your grace so illuminate my day to day that I learn how to see more clearly, to love more dearly, and to follow more nearly – day by day by day. Amen”

In hope and promise – DEREK