by Theodore Telepak

Created on: June 30, 2008

"Looking At and Looking Along"

What do you see?

Once the shadow had passed, sunlight came bursting through the gaping holes of the decrepit hut roof we were about to replace. Its rays reached longer than the palm tree branches I was getting ready to cut with a machete. I found myself standing there, looking not just at' the light, but along' it, to see where it would lead and to what it would illuminate.

I was hot and sweaty. In the middle of a poor Mayan village, somewhere in the Yucatan, serving as a missionary, I began to understand, "Why?".

I began to look' at life, and my perception of it, with a different perspective, after reading a book called "The Business of Heaven". Compilations of writings from C.S. Lewis are presented by Walter Hooper, which entices the reader to see beyond the boredom and irrelevance of everyday life, what it is, and what may become. Lewis even questions, "Will we be bored by heaven?"

Lewis is bold enough to say that "we feel, even if we do not say, that the vision of God will come not to fulfill but to destroy our nature" and that "this bleak fantasy often underlies our very use of such words as holy' or pure' or spiritual'." But he does not end there. Lewis declares, "We must not allow this to happen if we can possibly prevent it. We must believe and therefore in some degree imagine that every negation will be only the reverse side of fulfilling. And we must mean by that the fulfilling, preciously our humanity; not our transformation into angels, nor into Deity".

Is life fulfilling? Is life fulfilled only through that which seems to be in direct contradiction to it? Perhaps all that is holy', pure', and spiritual' is here in the brokenness, ugliness, ordinariness, and messiness of just who we are, and to be fulfilled in us, not in spite of us.

If life is not fulfilling, then, "Why?" Life and your perceptions often change when the very circumstances of the moment stare you directly in the eyes, and confront you with what matters most. Especially when it hurts. Lewis writes, "Pain is God's megaphone to a deaf world".

What will you choose?

I will always remember what I saw in that Mayan hut, as Lewis remembered what he saw in a tool shed. He writes in "The Business of Heaven" of once being in a darkened tool shed during a brilliantly sunlit summer day. You could imagine yourself being there. He poignantly tells of not just looking at' a beam of light that squeezed its way through one of the cracked boards, but of wanting to look along'

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