Part Here/Part There

We live our lives like that - part here, part there, part satisfied, part not. Though true adulthood remains for me a fairly elusive state, one into and out of which I dart, I think that residing there means coming to be comfortable with the partial. It is not so much that we redefine our hopes and dreams to make them fit our circumstances as it is that we come to realize that what is really is good, a mix of course, but largely good. A snapshot of any moment in our life could be tweaked - a little more of this, a little less of that; but the teaching of adulthood is that tweaking is always retrospective; and even more, we learn that if we really could redo a moment with the benefit of hindsight, yet another unanticipated opportunity for tweaking would no doubt appear.

Theologically life is like that as well. The realm of God is both here and not, present and very much yet to come. Glimpses of grace, sometimes a snuggling grandchild, sometimes a city skyline at dusk, are the reminders we need that this is it and that there is more to come.