Someday the Fog will Be Lifted
By Elizabeth Prata
Driving to school in the morning I encountered heavy fog. To a New Englander, fog is an old friend. Its constant presence, threat of presence, or dissipating presence is part and parcel of the daily life of a Yankee who lives near the sea.
Those horizon level coils of wiry dark, looking like far off barbed wire wrapped in a pillow soft and damp, rolls in and rolls out. Its silent stealth can envelop you as you’re mowing, as you’re driving, as you’re sailing.
We encountered fog numerous times while sailing. Seeing the fog bank up ahead causes you to jump down to the navigation table with alacrity, take a few more positional calculations, check the soundings, and then, blink, you’re enveloped. Like a misty blanket, the fog surrounds you ever more presently until you cannot see the end of your own bowsprit.
You peer ahead for any landmark, anything solid. The mushiness of seeing through fog is disorienting. Suddenly you don’t know up from down.
So I was driving along to school in the wee, dark hours. I marveled that a loose conglomeration of mist droplets could seem so solid. It was astonishing how the fog, heavy as it was to subdue my headlights’ beams to mere slivers, yet seemed to enhance the Christmas lights on the houses I passed by into a glistening glow.
Everything I viewed along the ride was murky, distorted, at the same time beautiful and terrifying. I didn’t know what to be scared of and what to feel secure in. Was that a cluster of leaves blowing in front of the car, or an animal? Why are the white lights glowing so golden?
Then as I neared my school in a blink I was out of the bank. I popped out quicker than a grasshopper in front of a combine. Suddenly everything was sharp and clear. Though a fog bank is indistinct, it is evident. Though it is unformulated, it is palpable. And then it was gone. Or at least, behind me.
It made me think of life here on earth and life in heaven. The verse ‘through a glass darkly’ came to mind. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, we will see Jesus, as He is, his heaven, which is the REAL place to dwell. No more veil. No more sin-nature obscuring our vision and darkening our heart.
The blind will SEE! We see now, to be sure, but only through a fog of unreality and sin. When the fog lifts, we will see everything clearly. It will happen. It will happen abruptly, unexpectedly, but it will happen. We will see Jesus clearly in person, and what a sight that will be. When the indistinctness of life here in the dim dark clears to display diamond glittering brilliance of God’s glory, we may well indeed shout, Praise to the Father of Lights!
