“Earth’s crammed with heaven,/ And every common bush afire with God;/ But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,/ The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries.”- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
“Ears that hear and eyes that see — the LORD has made them both.”- Proverbs 20:12
Mark Batterson continues Chapter 4 of Primal as he talks about a book titled The Island of the Colorblind by Oliver Sacks. The tiny atoll of Pingelap consists of three small islands in the South Pacific. The total area is less than three square miles. After a great typhoon is 1775, a surprisingly large proportion of the next generation was born colorblind.
Elsewhere in the world, colorblindness affects less than one in thirty thousand people. On Pingelap, the condition affects one of every twelve people. The sad irony, Pastor Batterson notes, is that few places on earth display more beauty and color than this tropical paradise.
Yet, Mark asserts, many of us display blindness to wonder. Although miracles occur around us all the time, we lack the perceptual capacity needed to perceive them. We’re in God’s presence, but show no awareness of Him. And God’s glory surrounds us, but we fail to see it.
As a result, Pastor Batterson puts our visual limitation in perspective. Visual range, he states, equates to one playing card in a stack of cards stretching halfway across the universe. Put another way, we see only a very thin slice of reality. And the same holds true on a spiritual level.
In contrast, our omniscient God sees everything from every angle, a 360-degree perspective. For God exists outside our time-space dimension. Because of our viewpoint, we need the Holy Spirit to help us compensate for our sensory limits.
Today’s question: Do you see every bush afire with God, or do you pick blackberries? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Suffering from spiritual somnambulism”
