Light For Your Fog

The fog hangs heavy this morning like a veil obscuring the sight, of all that is home.

 

Home, this place where we have lived for the last six years, has become all too often a place I want to run away from.  Not my own home mind you, but my neighborhood, this corner of the earth that feels like daily I watch it deteriorate before my very eyes, pieces of it crumbling into oblivion. 

Oh, I’ve wished I could get out of here.  Run away from all this mess to a place that is quiet and tidy and safe.  But the neighborhood’s falling faster than our money can pay down this mortgage, and we get a notice that the house has dropped twenty or thirty thousand in value in the last two years. 

We read it like an obituary.   There’s no getting out of here.

So many of our neighbors are trying to move, trying to break free before it’s too late, but

It’s already too late.

I watch the kid selling drugs down the street.

I watch the boys who used to come play basketball with my twelve-year old son, turning to paths leading into deeper darkness.  These junior high age boys, stealing to get money for drugs, and if you have your eyes open it’s like you can watch it happen right in front of your face.

Last night the police helicopter was circling again.

The neighborhood watch says lock up your cars and lock up your house and be on the watch because it’s getting worse.  I’m on the watch.  But what I see is all the rot and stain of this sin infected world, I see dimly, thickly in this fog.

But what I need this morning, what I need more than anything, is clear sight.

What I need is a little light, to pierce this oppressive weight, suffocating. 

And so, this morning, I read this, words from the Light of the World, to pierce this heart fog.

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.  And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.  From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.  God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.”

He determined the exact time period in which I should live, He determined the exact place He wanted me to live. 

And He did this so that you and I, so we would seek God.

And find Him.

Because He is not far from each one of us.

Even here, in this falling down, rotting-stench of a place, He is here.

He is here.

On Mother’s Day I hear a knock at the back door.

And when I answer it, I see the boy without a mother standing there, looking shy and tentative in his pre-teen boy body.

“Hey, I just wanted to say Happy Mother’s Day.  Sorry I didn’t come to church with you today but I’ll be there again next week.  Yeah, I wanted to tell you Happy Mother’s Day.”

 

And my heart, it almost bursts.

“I wanted to know.  Are you going to have any more kids? Because if you do, I don’t think you can fit them in your house.  And then you might have to move.  I’m afraid that you’re going to move.”

“I don’t know.  But I guess we just have to trust God.”

Yes.  Even in this place of broken down lives, of motherless children, of the multitudes of fatherless,  of drug-dealer teens, of police helicopters, of mothers drowning in depression and kids wandering these streets,

He is here.

He came down to our sin-stinking world to make himself known, to buy us back from our slavery to ourselves and our sin.  To redeem all our foggy wandering.  To make us those who are like Him, who go after those being led away to death and rescue by HIs grace.

 

 

And Light comes to burn away this fog, and brings the clarity of vision, that God is indeed here.

 And where He is, is exactly where I want to be.