Three of our kids were born in Florida. The highest elevation in the whole state is only as tall as a vertical football field. There is no downhill skiing or rock climbing. John did take our preschoolers down a water slide that seemed pretty steep to me. But next to the Rockies it wasn't even a freckle.
I saw a bunch of
photos taken from a bird's eye view. They include Niagra Falls, the waterways in Venice, Chinese rice paddies, pyramids in Giza, tulip fields in the Netherlands and the skyscrapers of Dubai. It is vastly different than what I would see street side. I have actually been to a couple of the places and my kids have traveled to still more. But we never saw what an eagle does. Standing on the edge of a
Dutch canal my daughters and sons saw the ripples on the surface, and felt the wind as it picked up across the bridge. But they could not appreciate the perspective afforded in a fly by at ten thousand feet.
For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways mine. As the heavens are above the earth, so my ways are above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts. Isaiah 55
Last Friday I brought home two day old
chicks. They live their peckish lives in a storage box in the dining room and travel from the water jar to the scratch cups, with an occasional detour to cuddle up under the heat lamp. They are oblivious even to the furniture a yard away.
I am on the ground in this life. That keeps me up close and personal to every pothole and loose brick in the road. But it also distracts me from the broader landscape God holds for me. In the twenty five years I spent with
children under four life revolved around this diaper, that nursing chair, that bowl of cereal and back again. Sometimes I couldn't raise my head above the small box of mothering.
But even a few years later I can gaze at the moderately broader picture of young adults, who are not only bigger than me in three cases, they are bigger than my dreams.
