The trance of possibility

Some of us are drawn to the blank page. The possibility that an open prairie places before us when there are no mountains, no tall trees to impede the scope of vision. The freshly painted room with floor cloths still stretched across the floor…no furniture yet..no frames on the walls…the relationship when more is unknown than known. The silence in the mind just after a person has received a gift, before questions come. For some of us, beginnings are a place of peace. In Forrest Gump-ian terms, it’s the box of chocolates before the first piece of candy is removed for a taste.

If I had to stand before a tribunal somewhere to defend my faith, to stand before a jury not of my peers to “give the reason for the hope that is within me with meekness and fear,” I’d like to think my skills at debate (better known to my own mother as the propensity to argue with a stone) would elevate my status in the eyes of those in power of my immediate destiny so that if my life were in question, my life would be spared to debate another day. I’d like to think I know my Bible well enough to accurately conjugate the how-to’s of salvation, the miracles of Jesus, the main points of the Sermon on the Mount. I hope that I have prayed enough publicly that I would feel comfortable praying for my enemies and would be able to turn those beatitudes into “DO-attidudes” should push come to shove.

But, in my own life, in my own personal walk, the most poignant pointer to the fact of the resurrection which is the source of all hope in this world is the newness found in each new day, the same-ness of that newness and yet, the surprise tucked within the coating of each and every 24-hour period that causes one man to smile, another to laugh, another to cry, another to work, another to run, another to pray as though for a first time.

There’s such a comfort in knowing that at 7 a.m., I am pouring coffee into my mug just like everyone else. That children are turning one all over the planet to accompanying balloons. There is such conviction in the reality that hunger feels the same to every man, that imagination is not a respecter of children, that no matter how we vote, we close our eyes and we open them in the very same way.

 

Yet, give 100 people a blank piece of paper and a pencil and not one of us will draw the exact same picture. Not one of us will write the same poem or even remember the same points of humor in the same funny story. With God, all things are possible, before they are limited by expedience. My soul is drawn to the magnitude of that possibility. I am thirsty each day for the water that renews itself, for history that re-writes itself, for civilizations that re-build always around a premise that is as close to us as our own blood. If tomorrow becomes today, she will be brand new even though she has come to you millions of times before as a prevenient grace.

Within each day, within the sufficiency of each 24-hour period, exists the potential to know God.

-submitted by Kerri Snell