Too close to see

A friend took me to a little nook tucked away not an hour from here where great hunks of sandstone stuck out of the ground and had been sculpted by wind and weather over the centuries while red pines had grown up through and around them, it was quite an interesting and strange landscape, as if I had opened a book of fairy stories and was literally drawn into that peculiar and wondrous world.  It is strange that we will drive or fly hundreds or even thousands of miles to see some sight or wonder or event but obliviously overlook the selfsame right in our own neighborhood!  Sometimes it seems we are too close to see clearly.

What do I mean?  If you are standing right next to an elephant, you can probably see little but a chunk of gray wrinkly skin, a tale, or an eye, but if you back away to a proper distance you can truly admire this amazing animal.  It is the same with landscapes and even our own lives.  That is the happiest part of a vacation, at least in my estimation, the coming home and realizing what it is you missed and just how wonderful life as usual truly is.  Sometimes we just need to step back and reevaluate something to which we were standing too close to see clearly.  What are you standing too close to at the moment?

I watched a show once wherein an individual temporarily lost his sight, he 'saw' more in those three days of blindness than he had in his entire life and when his sight was restored, he was the happiest and most grateful man alive.  Sometimes we need to step back or even cut off something in life, perhaps just for a little while, to truly understand its impact or import (or lack thereof) in our lives, to regain perspective, to lose something not worth keeping, or to truly appreciate something we are taking for granted.

Even Jesus, God Himself in human flesh, often 'went out to a lonely place to pray,' when He could have been spending that time 'better' by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, etc., at least to His disciples' thinking, but even He needed time alone and away from the teeming masses and curious crowds, the stress and the noise and the pressure.  His followers and the Jewish nation wanted one thing: freedom from Roman oppression, while He had come to give the entire world something completely different, something none could understand at the first, and which even 2000 years later leaves many scratching their heads.

That is one thing I really like about the 'dechristianization' of America, or whatever this strange modern era is called wherein we shuck off our Judeo-Christian roots and strike out boldly into post-modernism, secular humanism, materialism, diversity, political correctness, or whatever this 'brave new world' is.  We were too close to the story.  Everyone was a Christian, but then again, no one was.  We all knew the stories, our grandparents went to church, we had been confirmed or baptized or something like that, we didn't do illegal things, we were 'good' people, we weren't Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist so we must be Christian, that is until that word became stigmatized and culturally 'uncool.'  Now, standing at a distance, we can truly appreciate that we never truly understood what that word meant, that we were only going through the motions, that we were only pretending, that we must make a choice to 'take up our cross and follow Him,' or to go our own way.  We can finally see the elephant for what it truly is.