Life is Not Always as it Seems…

This excellent, insightful, and encouraging article by Andree Seu was published in World Magazine on June 4, 2011.

In 2003 I had a new roof put on, and the roofer was careless with the flashings. Now I have never seen a “flashing” (Is that like saying I have never tasted a “grit”?), but I have it on good authority that the neglect of same is what caused, several years later, the collapse of my attic ceiling.

It started small (though by one’s late 50s there is no excuse for ignorance of the trajectory of small beginnings—the first white hair, the first age spot, the freckle of mold in the basement wall). I make infrequent trips to the third floor, and one day I spotted a slight bulge overhead that was not there before. I ignored it and over time a bulge became plaster dust on the floor, and then a cascade.

There are felicitous small beginnings too. I like to press zinnia seeds into the soil and day after day squint for the first sign of a fissure that presages the birthing of a tiny crook-necked head, so much like a human baby’s own debut.

But what I was thinking is that the slowness of things in nature—and in the supernatural—makes for strange earthly phenomena. Things appear the opposite of their true condition for a while. “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil” (Ecclesiastes 8:11). When I have lived against God’s law, I have often seemed to get away with it. The more time that elapsed, the more I was confirmed in my estimation—and in a general philosophical materialism. But the uneventfulness proved merely a gestation period.

You can read the rest of this article HERE.