Angels…everywhere…
Dec 14th, 2009 by ljkim
One thing about angels in the Bible is they don’t “come over” they “appear.” Meaning, they’re already there…you just didn’t see them until they appeared. Another thing about angels in the Bible is you’re not supposed to think about them too much. Their purpose is to be God’s messengers: so the center of attention is you or God, not them; focusing on them, like focusing on the puppeteers on stage dressed in black, defeats their purpose. Yet it’s hard to believe in angels without at the same time being fascinated by them. So why even tell us they’re there?
Angels remind us of the immense weightiness of everyday life. There’s a book and movie by the title “the Unbearable Lightness of Being”; pointing to the incredible “weight” of the meaninglessness of life (or at least that’s what I thought it was getting at when I saw it in the theater)… but reality is just the opposite. Every seemingly unimportant moment in time has an immense (even unbearable, which is why it’s easier to ignore it) amount of meaning.
I think I sensed this even before I knew anything about God. Jimi Hendrix was just some guy dropping acid making weird sounds with his guitar – or so it must have seemed at the time… But it was more than that. And Ernest Hemingway was just some sad looking guy drinking port, messing around, writing something in his notebook (I feel like I’ve sat next to lots of guys like that at coffee shops), and yet it was more than that. Steve Wozniak was just some geeky guy working at HP, building circuits in his mother’s garage…and yet it was more than that. Looking back in time, someone should have gone over to these people and blown a trumpet, gone on the news and announced that at each of these mundane anonymous moments, history was being written…
But that’s not even half the story. Every person you meet, every person you walk by is an eternal being of enormous significance…we just don’t realize it yet. And as a result every mundane moment of your life is filled with choices of eternal consequence. So who can blame the angels for coming to take a look?
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