Longfellow often said things best. Poetry has shaped the lives of many of us to different degrees. Its influence in my life has been profound. “things are not what they seem” rings loudly in my head today. I hope this is truth. I believe it can be. I have seen when it has been. At times I struggle to see the good that may come from pain. Men with working hands and no work to be found. The great thinkers thought great thoughts in dark moments. Even Longfellows greatest works were in the midst of depression. This understanding should cheer the troubled heart, lift our spirits a little, ease our burden, and instill hope. The human sees things differently than deity. We see through the lens of our senses, not the lens of understanding. Sensual moments teach us fear and hope. We fear that something bad may happen again, we hope something good will be ours once more. Our environments are the things we manipulate to insure the good and the bad in our life. To keep the bad out and to enhance the good. But these physical material things we feel we have such control over often display trickery and treachery in our lives. We play as children, educate as youth, graduate as adults, serve for a time as experts, then somewhere along the way we figure out that we don’t know anything! We have a moment of truth, a time of questioning, an unfair illness, and it ends up heading like a pimple as a midlife crisis. Finally God looks down one day and says: “hum….. it looks like this poor guy is ready to finally listen to me. I will see if he can hear me this time” Things are not what they seem!!! The “seem” is the feelings, the sensual, the moment of sorrow and the anguish of regret. The “seem” is what we call reality as if we were one dimensional creatures and God wants to introduce a three dimensional world to us. Things are Gods creations time is His illusion in our one dimensional understanding. His goal is to give us this new understanding. Things as they really are displayed to us by God have depth and breadth into the eternities so the human creature is disabled by his senses because that is all he knows. His sensual nature plays an awful trick on his faith in God. He cannot see Him, hear Him or touch Him. Yet we are his creation, all nature his handy work, testifying of his reality. Things are not what they seem but they are what God would have us experience! The combination of human life and time on earth is our great gift from God whatever the “seem” may do to us this day. Hold a child, kiss your spouse, smell a flower, write a love letter, swim The English Channel, smile, cook dinner, pull weeds, climb Mt. Everest, listen to a story, sing a song, watch fish, watch birds, eat a tree ripened peach, savor the chocolate, go on a walk, spend time with loved ones, say thank you and I love you. And always remember Life is not what it seems.
