After living in Ireland these seven years, I am getting used to grey skies. It doesn’t surprise me at all anymore to go a week or even two without seeing the actual sun. When I painted the mural on Rebekah’s wall, she asked what the blue was for. I told her it was the sky, and she said “No, Daddy, the sky is grey!” Still, there is enough light to do what needs doing, and what more can you really ask for? It strikes me that much of our lives are spent in a similar sort of partly-clouded fogginess, as far from the warmth of wonder as they are from the storms of real pain. It’s not because the world changes: it has been wonderful ever since God said it was good, and has been terrible ever since woman and man said He was not. Ever since then, beauty and horror are as tangled as a spider’s web that glistens in the morning sun even as it waits to kill. Of course, taking shelter from storms is completely natural. You can’t blame anyone for that. But has our hiding place also blocked the sun? What perverse self-protection could cause us to somehow forget the incredible wonder of our existence? To look at people, each as deep and teeming with life as any ocean, and walk away after skimming a few stones? To breath, taste, and touch daily treasures we could never have imagined ourselves, yet remain deaf to the symphony of Creation? The Fall has brought us pain, to be sure, but I am beginning to believe that the real power of it’s destruction was in blinding our eyes to the awesome beauty that constantly assaults our every God-given sense. It is my personal opinion that God sometimes provides us a dose of pain as if it were a medicine to heal our wonder-starved souls: since we refuse to see it in it’s embarrassing excess, He mercifully draws our attention through scarcity. And still we choose the fog.