Seeing Clearly

As I go through my day I interact with a variety of people.  Bankers, real estate people, retired folks, youth, up-and-coming young people, children, parents, sales people ... every kind of person you can think of.  They all think that the world as they see it is reality.  Then I read about a man God calls "his servant Job."  In the oldest book, the oldest story and maybe the most complex theology in the Bible.  The story of Job cries out over the centuries saying, "Open your eyes ... see the world with the clarity of God's eyes ... there is more than meets our human eyes."
C. S. Lewis understood this when he wrote an amazing story called "The Great Divorce."  In this story the characters live in a place much like "The Matrix" of our modern movie.  They survive in a world that has a simple structure ... if you can imagine it you can have it.  Problem is, 'it' is always of low and diminishing quality.  The houses are alright but soon the owner longs for a better one.  The neighborhoods are alright but soon the resident begins to imagine a place where the grass is greener.  The neighbors are fine until you get to know them. You find they all have problems.  So you move out to the next neighborhood, always 'better' and always not quite enough.  This is Lewis' description of hell.  A bus arrives that will take everyone who boards to heaven.  When they arrive in heaven the fireworks begin.  It seems heaven is real ... too real for the likes of the ghostly crew on the bus.  The grass is so hard it hurts their feet.  The water is so hard the wraith-like hell dwellers can walk on it.  But that's not the worst thing.  The people of heaven are real.  They speak truth.  They live out love and forgiveness.  They are better than no one and are, in their heavenly form, so beautiful it is hard to look at them.  They can enjoy the reality and stark beauty of heaven because they buy into what God has told them.  They really believe the stuff people today call mythical, "good philosophy" and 'story.'  At the end of the bus trip all but one of the wraiths get back on the bus.  They cannot deal with reality ... it is too transparent and they don't like it one bit.
Job is a story of a good man having his view of God transformed.  He enters righteous, proud, demanding an audience with God.  He departs broken, silent and humble, seeing a true and Holy God in a clarity that completely disarms Job.  Maybe if the people I see every day would see God in His Holiness, they would do what Job does ... place their hand over their mouth, just listening to God speak through His Word, His creation and His power.  I too will place my hand over my mouth.  I will listen and watch for the reality of God to happen all around me.  May I have eyes to see and ears to hear!  Pastor Randy