There's something about finally going to a place you've heard so much about. Meeting someone you've always wanted to meet. A few responses would be disappointment, incredulity, disgust, awe, bewilderment, fascination, etc. Something so exciting about something, whatever it is, that's new.I didn't actually know as much about this place before I arrived as I thought I did. It's beautiful. The liffey smells bad when the sun's beating down on it. The weather is perfect - but not rainy enough. The people are friendly - and completely unhelpful when it comes to anything besides pointers on slagging.
There is a world out there; a world glowing with its own radiance. It's spinning on a gravitational pull, much like the one we all feel inside of us. A silent tug, nudging us from our sleep as we daydream through another glorious day.
Seriously, have you even gone outside today? And if you have, was it just to get into a car to take you to some other building? And if for some reason you really have gone outside for more than just a short trot across the lawn, what did you see?
Or maybe I'm the only one who wakes up one morning and suddenly realizes how much of my life I waste on secondary, vaporizing things. Asking myself questions like, 'What did I do yesterday that will matter exactly one year from now? One month? Tomorrow?'
The answers leave me disgusted with myself. They motivate me to get up and greet the day. To enjoy a stroll through the city on a beautiful, sunny morning instead of just getting to where I'm going. A voice in the back of my mind that is always whispering to me, telling me how short my life really is. A wrong step in front of a bus; a quick swallow of the wrong pill; a little slip of a too-sharp knife; a gas explosion in a trailer kitchen.
Depressing? Maybe. Gets the point across, though, doesn't it? I have no idea what the next few days will hold. I came here expecting to be surprised, but the real surprise was not the location, the people, my tasks. The beauty in all of this is not that I'm somewhere new. It's that I am the same here as I was 4000 miles away. It's being reminded yet again that God isn't done here.
And He won't ever be done. Because the very day He finishes with me is the day I will cease to exist. So instead of waiting around for Him to do what He's gotta do, why not make the most of what He's teaching?
Don't pine away the hours waiting for that one big highlight of your day. Instead, look for the other things around you. Maybe you could be someone else's day's highlight. Or maybe there will be no highlight at all. What are we, children that need to be entertained?
Today, be it rainy, chilly, sunny, windy - today is a gorgeous day. It's another shot at yesterday, but even better because it's today. So make sure as you go out there and start your day, you treat it not like yesterday, not like tomorrow. But your single last chance to compensate for every lost moment you've ever given up. And yeah, maybe you're waking up to the same ceiling you've woken up to for longer than you want to think about.
But I bet that ceiling could teach you a few things about the height, depth and vastness of a small, gentle pull starting at the core of the earth and spreading into the inmost parts of every human being on this planet.
Stop looking at gravity as something that's holding you down. Eagles soar in spite of it; what are you doing?
