Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Fishin'.

I have not had anything to say for a couple of weeks now.

After staring at that sentance on the screen for about a minute and a half, I had a thought. It kind of hurt. Perhaps more accurately, I remembered a thought I had a few days ago.

I don't remember where, but I once read something about a fish, living in a pond with a lot of other fish, and who lived a fairly good fish lifestyle. One day, this fish is taken out of the pond by a scientist who had been studying these fish for some time. The fish finds itself unable to breathe, to move in the manner to which it is accustomed, held in two strange pink fleshy things and peered at by a monster as incomprehensible as it is hideous. Finally, the fish is placed back in the pond, where it tries to explain its experiences to the other fish, some of whom think he's lying, and the rest of whom simply can't comprehend the universe he describes. Now, I think the guy who wrote that was comparing it to alien abductions, or something, but it came to mind in church last Sunday when my pastor was teaching on being a fisher of men, and it occurred to me that that's not a particularly attractive image when you think about it. I know He didn't mean it this way when He said it, but it's one of those thoughts that just occurs to me and won't go away. I mean, you and I are scaly fish swimming around, chilling in the sea of Galilee, when out of nowhere, a worm falls from the sky. Clearly, some higher power from somewhere above the waves wants to bless us with a free meal. When our hypothetical fish-selves bite into the wriggling little morsel, an unexpected, sharp pain shoots through our mouths, and we feel ourselves tugged inexorably upward. We break the surface, leaving the universe as we know it, and die gasping. Yeah. Sign me up. I just remembered that they used nets instead of the worm on a hook we know today, but the idea's the same. Shoot. That derailed my train of thought and spoiled my point.

My new point is that there's more to this universe than we can see in this life. Heaven is not going to be sitting around on a cloud strummin' a harp for eternity, but it's not going to be like anything we ever experienced or imagined either. Our earthly selves are chained to a certain perspective and until we're with God, we won't know what causes the universe as we know it to work. I've been reading a lot of books on quantum physics and string theory lately, and even though I don't understand a lot of it, it opens a lot of interesting thoughts, of which this is one.