As Simple as Sunshine

I’m going to put behind me, all the whinging I did yesterday when I was in a fairly black mood. I’m going to put on my big boy pants today, get outside and enjoy some of that free sunshine. It’s a strong elixir against the negative thoughts that can creep in during those long months when Canadians are trapped indoors. 

It’s easy to be overwhelmed. There is a lot going on in the world that you could have to be an ostrich with your head buried in the sand to ignore. There is that nasty worldwide pandemic that just keeps ticking along. There is the devastation to our economy and to families personally. Businesses are suffering. Those working from home are waking up to a new deal that they did not bargain for…. literally. No labour laws to preside over what work you can get remotely. That’s the reality for a lot of people learning all over again about making a living during the pandemic. They say that those worst hit are the very young who have not yet established careers, and those close to retirement like myself who have to be an old dog learning new tricks. 

I have a solution for all that. First off I am going to go OFFLINE and forget all about the internet. It seems to be a sluiceway for all that is wrong with the world. Opening up the news first thing in the day can be an avalanche of bad news, with pundits all piling on with Nostradamus kind of predictions. 

Of course you would need a crystal ball to see all this coming. Who would ever imagine that we would need something like a vaccine passport to do something as simple as work or travel? And yet that seems to be where it is all going, along with our traditional freedoms. I can remember sermons in church when I was a kid preaching about the Beast, 666, revelations and the end of the world. They imagined at one point that bar codes were the end. Those universal product codes that you scan at the grocery store. Few of us remember that before that, all prices were stickered onto an item. There was no scan, and no electronic tracking of inventory. It was prescient of course to imagine that a scan could one day apply to human beings, but they were a little early in their predictions. 

There is that fullness of time thing, where the Bible tells us that things are going to get worse before they get better. That is, things are getting (yes) worse and (yes) better at the same time. Better means that worse is hastening along the promises of God that will bring all Biblical prophecy to fruition. Fruition means tribulation, a straining and separating of who is faithful, and honest assessments of what you are living for. Allegiances are established pretty quickly along the lines of basic freedoms and being able to eat. No wonder the Devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness, with the idea of turning stones to bread. 

In life, we get those macro problems, combined with all the minutiae of our own finances, relationships, bringing up kids, et cetera et cetera, ad infinitum. There is political correctness, and strife over gender and racial identity, whether we invited it or not. They come with the zeitgeist of the times. There can be a lot to worry about and it can be overwhelming. It might be a good juncture to remember that little song we sang as kids,  “He’s got the Whole World in His Hand”. It’s a “Spiritual”, that is a song people in bondage cooked up to remind themselves none of this is forever, and even if it does not look like it, it is all going in the right direction. 

It feels like it’s about five minutes to midnight. Maybe it is on some kind of world clock out there. There are a million doomsday kind of clocks. Those which track finances and debt, those which count down to nuclear destruction, those which track the environment as something dissipating and tending toward entropy. 

And then there is God’s clock, the one we are reminded of in the Bible where time in general doesn’t matter so much, where a thousand years is a day and a day is a thousand years in God’s sight. There is the assurance that THESE specific troubles are temporary, that they will all pass in the grand scheme of things. That’s the rub. Life is temporary. It’s ALL temporary. Only the things of God will last in the end. That’s something to think about. It means that all our earthly plans will come to naught. It is good news depending on how you think of it. 

How about anticipating a body that does not get tired, age and decay? How about never having to attend another funeral? How about not having to worry that there will be enough, or that those in your charge will be OK? That’s something to think about and maybe to celebrate. Our earthly plans come with inherent flaws. There is that song about Heaven, “I can Only Imagine”…. but we cannot and that is the problem. We don’t want to trade off the temporal for the eternal because we are pretty attached to the present scheme of things. 

But we do get those reminders of the sublime. Looking out on the new day, I see the sunshine. It’s free medicine. It’s harkening for me to go outside and enjoy some of it, and to forget my cares for a bit. It’s a reset of who’s really in charge. The one who made this sunshine that I am going to enjoy, made all things and planned all things. How bad can it be when the one in charge is the same one who made the sunshine? Something as simple as sunshine can suddenly put it all in perspective.