July 16, 2008 – Chennai, India GMT +5:30Today I was on my way to teach at our Bible school in Nagalapuram, when the car broke down. Actually I was taking a nap in the back of the car, from which I awoke after my body sense that we were stopped for some unknown reason. The car wouldn’t start and the driver thought it was the alternator. I got out and pushed and we got the car started again, but immediatley smoke started billowing out of the engine. We shut it off again. We weren’t that far along on our journey, only about 30 kilometers from my flat. I left Kumar with the car and returned by auto rickshaw to my home.
My flat as many of you may know sits practically right on the beach, the ocean and sky stretch away indefinitely from the roof of my building, and when I go for a walk my glasses are often covered with salt by the time I return. On this particular day driving back to my flat in the late hours of the morning, we were riding along almost due East, straight towards the ocean. We came over a small rise in the road and I could see, down the road between houses and trees, a glimpse of that same sea. It wasn’t so much that I could see the sea, as I filled it in. When I think back on it now, I am almost positive that I saw nothing of sand or foam, or gently rolling blue. The road was a narrow one, there was a great amount of overhanging foliage, people, cars, and general traffic and the end of the road and the beginning the peaceful was still 1/4 of a mile away. There was a small gap and through it could be seen not deep blue, but empty blue, not sea but sky, not something but nothing. It was a gap, a hole, that was it but in that hole I saw the sea. My brain, my eyes, my body knew it was there, despite the fact that it could not be seen. If you had asked me the second after that moment, “Can you see the sea from here?” My answer would have been a smile, a point, a consternation as I suddenly realized that no you could not in fact quite see it. It was there certainly in my brain, filled in in full color, like that one spot your eye can’t see, and yet there is no hole in your vision. Even if I had never been to that part of town before, never come down that road, never before set my eyes to skim over tar and under leaf towards that single opening, I’m still sure I would have seen in that opening the sea. Who knows what small signs assist the mind in such a calculation, a slight drop in temperature, a tiny shift in breeze, the taste of salt on the tongue as the breath flows through your body, the faint hint of a sea gulls cry, all too small too be grasped by conscience thought, but nevertheless all noted, calculated and filed. Small numbers which signal deep blue and sand white.
So is our God, or rather our knowledge of our God. I have deep respect and a great appreciation for those who labor in the field of apologetics. I appreciate very much their intense understanding, their calculated and reasoned defense of the Word of God. My own mind often seeks for just such answers. But in the end all they can do is describe what isn’t there. They can look down the road and see the endless sky, the open emptiness where there ought to be buildings and trees, but to fill it in takes something else something more. Not because the proof isn’t there, not because the clues aren’t there but because they are beyond our ability to cope with, to quantify and to categorize. Nevertheless we know it to be true, we know it to be certain. The Word adds what our minds cannot quite grasp. Faith, given by the grace of God, reaches beyond the emptiness, below vacancy. There filling the void is the Lord God. And then grasping what cannot be grasped, understanding what we do not want to know, faith fills not only fills in the gap, but colors it to. We know the color of the Lord, how to fill Him in. Not all, not completely, but partly. We know because we have seen Him.