An 'above the sun' perspective

Today’s little meditation is about hands. First, President Harry Truman’s irritated quip about practitioners of the arcane science of economics:

“Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, on the one hand…on the other”

The days while my mother was dying were the staging ground for a tug of war in my father’s mind between hope and hopelessness: Will Paulette get better? Was she really a believer? Is life worth living now? My father’s thoughts swung back and forth as wildly as the arguments of a roomful of Keynesian and Austrian economists.

These were the darkest moments of those weeks. But I recognized that some of the fears my father entertained were “under the sun” thinking (to borrow a phrase from Ecclesiastes). My father would do well until he began to lower his eyes from the heavens and focus only on what his eyes could see “under the sun.” Then he would start to sink. The diagnoses of the doctors, the natural lapsing into morbid what-ifs, the second-guessing over what we could have done differently that might have saved her—these tormentors in the blood thrive only in a heart that has momentarily slipped from its focus on God.

Which brings me to the next “hand” reference:

“Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed, and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed” (Exodus 17:11, ESV).

The Bible says that all Scripture is profitable for teaching (Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:16). Therefore I am emboldened to adduce the example of the two men, Aaron and Hur, who held up Moses’ weary hands so that the battle would stop careening wildly back and forth, and the victory would be won.

Every time my father would speak from the perspective “under the sun,” I would push back with a perspective from “above the sun,” where Christ is seated with authority and where everything is possible. And to my great delight, it worked. At the very sound of truth, my father’s countenance brightened and his spirit revived. If slippage is the main nemesis of the Church (Hebrews 2:2), then truth-filled fellowship is its antidote (Hebrews 3:12–13). As often as it will be needed, it will be had.

And so we praise God for the severe mercies in our lives, because these are where Christian “theory” becomes real in us. We actually practice fixing our eyes on what is unseen rather than what is seen. We come to the point where the unseen things are more real to us than the objects of our senses.

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