"We act in faith, knowing that we see only dimly. But living in faith, we act anyway, choosing and doing the best we can. We act and live in confidence that someday we will see face to face, that we will live into the answers. For God’s grace embraces our questions as well as our answers and our blindness as well as our vision, just as the sun shines steadily through the night, waiting to illumine the sky at dawn." Jean M. Blomquist, Wrestling till Dawn
Looking out our windows this morning, before sunrise, the fog created a magical vision as the streetlights shone into the haze. The houses up and down our street, those I know so well that I don’t really see them any more, were masked by the ground clouds that enveloped them. I struggled to remember what I knew….their colors, their shapes. Squinting into the darkness and invisibility, I struggled to really see.
Fog can be a great metaphor for how we walk through our lives. There is so much that blurs our vision. I was reminded of this last week as I read newspapers from a different part of the country. The coverage, the questions, the issues that were related to the political process at hand seemed foreign to me. Through their lens, the view was different than what is reported here in Minnesota. What mattered to the people there was different given their life experience, their world view, how they live their daily lives. I felt as if I was looking into a fog.
The same is, of course, true in the church. People of faith have a lens that is colored by their world view, their life experience. A seminary professor I once had said that real estate and our theology have much in common: Location, location, location. My view as an middle-class, educated woman defines how I see the Holy at work in the world. My lens allows questions that would not be important or relevant to others. Yet all our questions, all our searching, all our life experiences hold equal weight in the eyes of God. And I believe that our coming together as people of faith, with all our lenses and our lives, helps us to see the bigger picture….the wider image of God if we are open to being illuminated by the views of another.
Jean Blomquist also writes: " Our questions can serve us well in a time such as this, a time of great uncertainty, of soaring potential, of fragile yet resilient hope. Our questions and questing are crucial, because they can help us live into the answer of the future. I am certain of one thing: the love that is God is at the heart of the answer, just as it is at the heart of each moment-past,present and future."
The fog will lift. We can count on it.