Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

My title comes from a song by The Platters (1958). Though the title fits my theme, I can’t even make sense of the lyrics, something about a lost love, like that’s ever happened. But the other background in my mind is from an Australian pastor/writer/podcaster, Mark Sayers. I read his books during the Covid shutdown, and he talks about times of cultural transition. He describes our current situation as passing from one order to another. We have an understanding of where we have been, but not what is around the corner. He calls this time “the gray zone,” or, in Australian, “the grey zone.” We cannot see far into the distance, or around the corner.

And with our hazy conditions of late due to faraway forest fires, I’ve been thinking a little bit more about this - the grey zone, and times of transition, and what comes next. It seems to me that all of life is one big transition, so descriptions of particular transitions are relative.

We can probably think of several illustrations of the grey zone. The “war” in Iran has paused and “un”paused. There seems to be no clear resolution, with new realities in place. We don’t know what comes next. Also, inflation was low for a long period before the government started passing out money like buttered French toast. Now its elevated, and some say that we will not return to low rates any time soon (experts are often wrong). But, we don’t know. That’s the point. We don’t know, and there is much that we do not know.

It seems, then, that we would do well to focus our attention on what we do know, on what we believe deeply. What is it that we know even when smoke gets in your eyes, or when we cannot see around the corner? As Christians, we call it “revelation.” It is not what we can see. It is what has been shown to us, revealed to us, in Word and Deed.

The Word to which I refer is the inspired Word of God, and without that Word, we would have to depend upon our own observations to come to believe a great many things. But human observations are notoriously unreliable. We would have to concoct a god from which the world came and to whom we are accountable, and of course, we would fashion him in our own image. That’s a problem. Our own self-knowledge would be ridiculously self-congratulatory. But revelation gives us God’s account of Himself and of how we got here. He also tells us about His plan and also His purpose. He outlines the contours of that plan and purpose in four episodes: Creation; Fall; Redemption; Consummation. Those four episodes tell us from whence we came; what went wrong; how it can be fixed; and what then our hope would be. This all centers in Christ, which is the “Deed” part above, whom, by revelation, we receive and believe.

I’m not a student of evolution, but perhaps Darwin would have answered like this: 1) where did we come from? from an cosmic accident followed by natural causes; 2) what went wrong? Well, nothing really, but then, nothing can be called “right” either; 3) what is the fix? Survival of the fittest; 4) what is our hope? To be buried in the soil like groundhogs.

We don’t embrace a belief system because it is either warm or cold. But embracing God’s revelation, I can see clearly with eyes of faith. Given Darwin’s account, it seems smoke gets in my eyes. Darwin, the unbeliever, was trapped in a forever grey zone - no Creator; no Redeemer; no hope.