Another World

For this to make any sense, I need to say a bit about where I am. Located off of St. Martin in the Caribbean is an island called Anguilla. It’s a spectacular island with no ports for cruise ships and no hotels with cassinos. Glistening light green seas reflect of the soft sand and stark white buildings. In other words, it’s a different world, or at least a world far away from the one I know. In fact, as I sit on our balcony with my coffee this morning and watch the sun rise behind the mountains across the bay, I’m incapable of comprehending the scene before me.

As beautiful as it is, part of me wants to open one of my devotionals, turn on my phone, or listen to my spiritual music. I know those things. I get those things. I use them every morning, but what lays before me is beyond me - beyond past experiences, beyond the usual practices that help me make sense of the world . . . therein lies the valuable lesson.

I believe there’s much more to life than what we see, or at lease more than what we allow ourselves to see. I suppose my sense of this is why I consider myself a spiritual person, but this morning reminds me just how little I know about that “something more.” It’s as if I’ve gone through life beside a wall. I’ve heard about the world on the other side. I’ve even heard sounds and seen glimpses of it when I’ve tried to climb up the wall, but I’ve never looked at it head on like I did this morning.

My hunch is, seeing the “something more” is unsettling and incomprehensible. I’ll want to reach for a devotional, check my phone, or play music rather than sit and experience something beyond my imagination or control. Life on the other side of the wall “surpasses human understanding,” someone once wrote. To hear about a place where people live as one, love all, forgive all is beyond me. To hear of a place where we are not in charge, where we live at one with the one who created us, where the meek inherit the earth and God’s love extends to the most unlikely, is to encounter a place where the horizon of grace extends beyond my touch and none of the things I use to ground me will work to make sense of God’s world.

I imagine this is how it’s been for those who’ve ever encountered the world not as we have known it, but as God created it. It must have been all over Moses’ face when he came down the mountain. It must have animated every conversation people had after seeing Jesus and hearing about this thing he called the “kingdom of God.” He was describing another world, one he knew, and it must have been as exciting as it was frightening to witness it. Like us, people back then must have wanted to run back to the world they knew rather than toward the one they’ve just encountered.

This morning, I sure would like to become one of the latter.