Seeing Clearly

Recently, I sat on the deck of the vacation home I was renting with my family, feeling the fog wrap around me, frizzing my hair and making everything slightly damp. I curled up with my coffee and watched as the swimming platform floating in the lake gradually revealed itself with more clarity through the mist. It looked unmoored, disconnected. I couldn’t tell what was sky and what was water. It seemed to be a thing entirely apart. 

I was praying for clarity, trying to discern my next steps, and watching the fog disperse started to become a spiritual practice for me. We can’t always see clearly, it reminded me. Sometimes, our ability to see certain things distinctly can trick us into a belief that we can see everything that is relevant. Both for good and ill, we tend to trust our own vision, to rely on what we see. But what if we can’t see everything that is pertinent? What if we have become too reliant on our own perspicacity?

As I watched that swimming platform emerge from the clearing fog, what struck me the most was how hard it was to tell what it was connected to. It seemed totally apart from everything in the unreality of the cloud drifting around it. But the reality was that the platform remained as tethered and connected as always, I simply couldn’t see it. The fog reminded me to consider the ways that I am connected and enfolded, even if I don’t have the clarity of vision to see it all the time. In the midst of the fog, I felt God invite me to wonder if perhaps the resolution to my questions was much closer than I realized, that I might not realize just how close it has been until the fog clears just a bit, or I take another step into the mist to see what is coming my way. It reminded me that even though some things remain obscured from my vision, I remain upheld in so many substantial and important ways. If I stop long enough to pay attention, I find that I am able to notice it again, even in the midst of all that is unresolved.

More often than not, the answers we pester God for emerge slowly. And often, I have found, we already hold a lot more of the pieces than we realize. We stare at what begins to emerge as the fog burns off, and sometimes what we perceive makes no sense at first, until suddenly it does. The pieces click into place and reality makes itself known to us in new ways. That didn’t happen for me as I sat that day, but the practice of watching the fog burn off, first slowly, and then all at once, brought me some peace. It reminded me to notice the ways that I am connected and enfolded even in a season of feeling unmoored and unsure about what comes next. It reminded me to both trust what I see, but also remember that I cannot see everything. It reminded me that I’m not able to know when what I am looking for is on the cusp of entering my field of vision and when it still a ways off. Even so, I can trust the ground beneath me, remembering that I am more connected than I realize.