“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story”
Orson Welles
Life is brittle.
It’s a tinder box and matchstick. Day after day, about to be scratched against a rough surface. Lit up. Burnt. Gone.
It’s just as the teacher in Ecclesiastes says it is - Life is fleeting, like a passing mist. All vanishes like a vapor; everything is a great vanity.
Theres a thick layer of smoke in the air that won’t settle or blow away or dissipate into wherever smoke goes. And it’s been here for months. Although its “unprecedented” like everything else in the news for the last three years, it is in fact, a new normal.
Drought.
How classic. Just another weather anomaly we have to get used to.
This much beloved autumnal season has become a dreadful junction on the calendar. It's supposed to be filled with vibrant colours and lush grasses. But this year we've been given a wasteland of ash-covered browns and consistent air quality warnings. A season stunted by smog and unhealth. This brittle Fall is perhaps the best parable for the vapor reality we all live in.
Do you feel it?
There’s a dryness in my throat and burning in my chest, like I’ve been forced to smoke a pack a day against my will. My voice seems lower and darker. My skin itches. There's no moisture left. Not in the body or tree’s or air.
The fire’s have won. As they increasingly do each year. Fire finds a way to enforce destruction most of the time, but this wilted and crispy landscape begs to be scorched all the more than usual. So with each day that the rain doesn't fall, a fresh hector, a new farm, another home gets sparked up and makes the news.
This dehydration hits the spirit fast. It reminds us of the fragile nature of all things. It rings the Ecclesiastes bell. Smoke, nothing but smoke.
Our arid windpipes call out for moisture and reprieve. For something more. Even though we know there won’t be more this side of heaven. What we can expect is more of this. More fires, more draught. More storms, more torrents. More "unprecedented" pain and suffering. Because nothing uncomfortable is actually unprecedented. We should expect it. And we should anticipate it everyday to some degree.
We should. But we don’t.
We expect precise seasons. We expect to know what’s coming next at all times. At least I do.
And it's not until I pull back the veil of my own misunderstanding of the promises of God that I begin to relate to the depressive teacher in Ecclesiastes. About the trouble and the pain and the seeming meaningless of it all.
God warned that man would make hellfire. And we did.
Fortunately He also made promises of resolution. The grand narrative that He's writing is more than just trouble. And when I ponder that great storyline of God - I remember how it ends.
If the story ends now than the story is a dystopian hell-scape of suffocating smoke.
But this isn’t the end.
Right now we live in the reality promised to us in John 16:33, about all the trouble in the world we'll have to endure. Like the easily lit dry bones of timber and carbon billows settling into the valley for belaboured lungs to breath in. This is just one of the many troubles promised. It echoes the words of that ancient critic and teacher that vanity is everywhere. In our toil, in our wisdom, in our self-indulgence.
Hevel, Hevel, everything is utterly Hevel.
Temporary, fleeting, perishable.
Cinder, Cinder, everything is ash.
The unexpected comfort in this, however, is that in all our toil and trouble, the story isn’t over yet. Jesus ends his warning with hope. As fires grow and meaningless feelings rise like embers in the night - an overcoming by the promised one is on the horizon.
The one mounted on a horse. The one with a sword. The one who comes in resplendent goodness and glory, to place all things in heaven and earth under His feet. To rightsize every wrong and bring the awe-inspiring beauty of heaven down to snuff out the hellish fires we started on earth.
These are the promises not yet seen. But are promises none-the-less.
Hope in the fog.
Life is brittle. Yes. There is smoke in the valley. And it sits and waits for the showers of heaven to come. The earth groans for renewal and our souls cry out for meaning. All creation longs for the quenching rain and reign of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But praise be - the story isn’t over yet.
And the forecast is good.
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