cheap trick
Unraveling heavy things, my friend tells me a story about taking her kids to see the dinosaur exhibit at the museum.
“In the beginning…”
She doesn’t use those words, not exactly, but she might as well have, because right from the beginning it feels as though her story belongs to me too somehow, belongs to you, as though it could be about us, walking together through this big world with our childlike hearts wide open.
I can see them in my mind, her kids, from the first expectant moment, tickets purchased, rainbow-socked feet slowly passing beneath some prehistoric arch, young jaws-dropped and grinning-happy, the imagination of a Jurassic World making their round eyes go glossy, making their heads swivel not to miss a wonder.
Thank heaven for the otherworldly displays that put things into perspective, that we can stand at the edge of the ocean dipping our toes and recognize a vastness beyond our comprehension; that we can stare up at the twinkling night sky and be swallowed up by beauty; that we can still stand beside a full-scale model of a dinosaur and remember we’re actually quite small.
For my friend, this adventure had been a worthwhile splurge. The dinosaur exhibit represented an opportunity to wander with her children through a mind-blowing time beside creatures who, by their sheer size and inconceivable history, challenge our grandiose ideas, and for a while, it had been fun. For a while, the kids skipped and learned and twisted their minds, if not their tongues, around the cumbersome, unpronounceable names of the dinosaurs—stegosaurus, diplodocus, triceratops.
I imagine the details, because my friend summarizes, getting to the point.
The whole earth is full of God’s glory, which means that we live out our vaporous lives in a hall of wonders, staring up at stunning displays of the heaviest holy. It’s true that the view here is dim, the exhibit only a veiled glimpse of a reality beyond the sight of our mortal eyes, the imagination of our minds, and yet, what there is to see here can flat out blow us away if we let it. Beauty, as Sarah Clarkson articulates so well in her book This Beautiful Truth, tells me all the time about God. When I slow down enough to behold, it raises gooseflesh on my arms. Sometimes, as the old hymn goes, it causes me to tremble.
My friend’s family meanders a while, trying to capture what they see, commenting, I’m sure, on what they notice and tucking away the facts and theories, patiently absorbing everything they can, their fingers reaching to touch velvety bones, their palms laid flat against the cold, bumpy surfaces of metal models. The experience somehow links them like a bracelet, as though looping their dropped arms with the gossamer threads of memory newly spun, an old story just taking shape in their minds.
In my mind, I follow my friend and her kids past the larger-than-life brontosaurus, thinking how God loves to show us around. Look, He says, I’m doing a new thing. Don’t you see it? I think of the prophet Zechariah way-back-when, getting a personal tour of the future, of God’s view of home, how Zechariah must have gaped, watching an angel measure the thickness of the walls. We are, you and I, always getting our own personal tour, and He has not merely summoned us to look from a distance, but invites us, like little children, to come, to touch, to taste, to experience, to enjoy the wonder of Him together until the truth captivates our hearts. Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!
On the other hand, we children walk through all that glory and then fall for a cheap trick.
My friend’s kids, they run right into the upsell at the end of the adventure, a dinosaur ride that looks a lot like a larger version of the old quarter-ride horses that sat rusting outside the grocery stores of our childhood, and the offer, at a cost, for an additional 3-D experience, and my friend firmly shakes her head and steers them toward the free coloring sheet they can take back home as a souvenir.
“It was like the exhibit itself had been nothing at all,” my friend says wearily, “as if we hadn’t even gone,” and what she means is that the children’s discontentment over her no, over what they would not be allowed to have for reasons they could not understand, overwhelmed all that she had already given them.
And instantly, as her voice falls, I know my own role in the story. I am the child who walks through an exhibit of glory and then complains over what I feel has been withheld from me, who forgets the heaviest holy and the taste of God while pining for some temporary pleasure. I would trade the feast itself for a plastic toy or a piece of gum. I can be so caught up in myself, so lost to what is seen and fading, that I treat my everyday experience of the eternal like nothing at all, and in this, I am not unique. This is, after all, the story of humankind, and there would be no happy ending except for the Way God made.
But let me not trivialize. Life is hard and our losses on the broken side of time bring us to grief, and our groaning and wailing isn’t always over some obviously cheap substitute for a living hope. I can feel lack down in my bones and mislabel the longing, and when I truly feel famished, it’s not clear to me at all that the bowl of stew which absolutely will assuage my very real hunger threatens also to outvalue my God-given birthright. It’s the human condition to measure things according to a broken system, and this is not something we can change merely by re-thinking things. A new heart, that’s what I need, and that’s the good God has promised always to be working in me, no matter how often I stumble, as long as I stay close.
My friend, she maybe winced as her kids looked up into her face and flung their words and their tears, but in love, the kind that well surpasses the short-sightedness of children, she took their hands anyway and led them home.
