Seeing the Unseen

It seems that I might be in the market for a new TV. It's really not my fault; I have to buy one. Over the Christmas holidays, someone broke in to my daughter's apartment and stole her TV... as well as doing some other pretty strange stuff. Being a loving parent, I want to help her get back on her feet and get over her trauma. Of course that means giving her my 27" TV and replacing it with... ahh, something somewhat bigger than 27"! after all, HDTV will eventually be REQUIRED, and so who am I to buck something legistated by the government?

Stuff! It is so easy to think that stuff we want is really stuff we need. It is so easy to buy into Madison Avenue's hype. If we aren't careful, we can thing the hype is real. The film The Gods Must Be Crazy is the story of a tribe of people in Africa so remote that they had never contacted anyone from outside their world. An airplane flew over their village and someone threw a Coke bottle from the plane. They decided that this artifact was a gift from the gods and thus of great value; they didn't know that it was only garbage. They had seen the airplane and had a glimpse of the sky, but they decided that the garbage, the junk, was what was real.

Everyone in the village wanted this gift of the gods for himself or herself. They fought over the artifact; their entire existence became centered on possessing it. They did not realize that their lives had come to be centered on junk. But they were wise enough to understand the damage, and they decided the gods must have been crazy to have ever given them the object. So they began a journey to throw the object off the edge of the world. They didn’t know that the gift of the gods was no deposit and no return!

Faith is the ability to see what is really real and what is really junk. God calls us to focus on that which is of real value surrounded by the world of junk. The thread than runs through Hebrews 11 is that the great heros of faith were men and women who could see what was unseen. We see the junk, and the junk can glitter. But all that glitters is not gold. The toys and trinkets around us are fun, but they are not real. May God help us to be people who more clearly see that which is unseen. Can we see it any better in 42" Hi Def?