[month of mornings] 14 :: seeing for real

[glory]

7:40 am

When I was a kid, like anyone who had been raised on picture book Bibles, I would see that moment when the light breaks through a crack in the clouds and streams down as though angels were riding on its beams, and would think it must meant that Jesus was returning at that very moment.

Time, and a little maturity made those moments lose a bit of their heart palpitating excitement, but the wonder remains. And even if I can't see Him, there are moments when the veil lifts and even in the darkness, a little light beams through. My own children looked way up at the sky this morning and repeated my childhood cries, "God is here!!" They too will learn, I hope, that indeed He is.

C.S. Lewis says that those moments when we are hit with a sense of longing that is almost painful because it is a fleeting joy, one we want to grasp but feel it forever fleeing, is that Real Joy that we were made for, but only catch in glimpses now. Glory glimpses.

These cloud breakthroughs, they may not mean I see the angels I once expected as a child gazing in wonder, but they do mean I see what becomes more and more real even as my childhood slips further and further away. Glory. It was here in the beginning, it shines even now, and it is coming again.