REFLECTIONS

Passing Through

A gentle breeze cooled the streams of sunshine casting their beams through the springtime air. Hurry was not on our itinerary so we paused from our travels to browse through a small country store. “Don’t mind us,” we said to the elderly storekeeper. “We’re just passing through.”

Advertising on the store walls promoted malts and milkshakes prepared the old fashioned way, and signs pointing to windup toys and candy bars that hadn’t been seen on modern store shelves in years recalled nostalgic memories of days gone by. Back then who would have expected those things to disappear from the way of life.

Those days, now so far in the distance, felt like they would last forever. Who could imagine the innovations yet to come; that something akin to Dick Tracy’s radio wristwatch would become commonplace and that space travel would reach beyond Flash Gordon comic books into life’s reality.

Sometimes things change so slowly that it seems there is no change at all. But passing through the aisles of this quaint country store was like a time machine journey back to the good old days. The contrast of past and present could not be ignored. Neither could we ignore that we too had changed with the times.

Whether malts, or windup toys or candy bars or human lives, all that was past once was new. They hold a place in time but in the progression of life, they were only passing through. God is ever present and ever changing the world we live in. “Forget the former things;” God spoke through Isaiah. “do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:18-19)

Some things, like God himself, will never change. Tomorrow’s gentle breeze will be around to cool the sunshine that falls on springtime air; and things of the past will be replaced by something yet unimagined. Our time in this world will still be brief on the scale of eternity, but we are not just passing through.

God placed us in this world to play an important part in it. We are his agents of change. Through us, he is doing a new thing.

Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

You are the light of the world,

Richard +

www.reflectingthesavior.org

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