There actually is a place I like perambulate of a morning. It happens to be an old abandoned highway that used to lead down into a river valley and run through a little town named after a Delaware Indian chief. In 1966 the river was dammed, the valley flooded, and a lake created. (The town was relocated before this, of course.) That town is the place where I now live, and the old highway leading to its ghost is still there, but now it's shrouded in trees and overgrown with brush and it trails off into the lake in lumps of broken asphalt.
As I walk along that road, I often try to imagine it when it was still being used (I see my dad driving his old Chevy down that road). In places you can still discern the yellow lines down the center. I'm sure the folks that used that road never imagined it would one day lay among the trees, hidden and deteriorating like a lost bit of rope.
And that's just the thing with us humans, isn't it? We tend to imagine that the way things are is the way they'll always be. Our highways, our homes, even our nations. But a quick look around should tell us plainly that this is just not so. Every grey, aging and abandoned home I see sitting in the middle of a Kansas field used to be a place where people lived, loved, ate and slept. It was their reality. And I'll bet they thought it would last forever.
Someday my own home will be in ruins, my address forgotten, my existence a faintly whispered memory. But, thank God, the changes I and every believer look forward to have a far better prospect than that!
"How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure." ~ 1 John 3:1-3
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