philosophy – INSPIRATION with an ATTITUDE

There’s nothing but beauty when you look into the eyes of your own 6-month old child. It’s just that after a grueling 12-hour flight from overseas with the precious teething infant who has refused to sleep for the past several days, weeks, months, feels-like-years, you can barely see that beauty because your own eyes are having trouble focusing…

So after scooping up our youngest (and said precious one with precious but equally exhausted daddy) from the airport and gotten everyone tucked into bed at the nearby hotel for the night, Grandma got to babysit after the next morning’s breakfast so the young couple could try for a brief nap before the next leg of the family vacation.

At this age, Sweet One is not only still trying to figure out her own sleep schedule, but is also nine time zones away from home. She is intelligent, (W-A-Y above average, naturally), inquisitive, and most of all…

…awake. Very awake.

She and I are walking, talking, bouncing around the hotel, and looking, watching, and then we start touching. I can almost see the synapses connecting. Different textures, different temperatures through tactile experience. But one item seemed to keep her attention.

It was the glass door.

She could see though it, but couldn’t see “it”. Her hand would pass easily through the nothingness of air until it came to the same seeming nothingness to her sight, although her hand would stop, suddenly. Interestingly, because she had no mental/emotional grid to process this, or a priori objections to the experience, she simply accepted it and moved on.

“Although I can’t see it, obviously something is there.”

I pray that this basic lesson will not be buried under layers of empty philosophy later in life.

“Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see…By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.”

Jesus affirmed a dimension more “real” than the one limited to human senses and experience. When I deny this, I deny myself the better part of my humanity and the potential expression of that reality:

I hazard myself (and others) to “be all that I can be” based solely on my limited self-concept, rather than the one for which I was uniquely designed.
I view situations through a lens of temporary, rather than eternal consequence.
My sense of peace and contentment will be linked to my personal sense of control, (and even a brief survey of history or a quick look at the news should blow that one out of the water!)

We made it to our destination all in one piece after a long car ride (though which Sweet One slept almost all the way!) Everyone is still in bed as I look into the cool fog on this Pacific Northwest morning. I know the mountains are there, but the fog is in the way, just like the unseeable glass door was in the way the day before. God’s reality is in play all around us.

(No wonder we need the faith of a child.)

Hebrews 11:1,3 Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Bob loves intelligent sci-fi, you know, the kind where you dare not walk out of the room or you might miss an important piece of the mental puzzle. (But then, he also likes big stupid scary monsters, like Godzilla, so I’ll just him “eclectic”.) He wanted to watch the movie Inception…again. Now, I’ve been vying for the old Jimmy Stewart black and white You Can’t Take It With You, so you can see our differences in taste. But he’s working on some of his own writing and he was doing some, shall we say, research. Because that’s what college professors do.