The view from here

It's often cloudy. Every now and then we get a glimpse of sunshine, or even a week of sunshine, but for the most part, it's cloudy.

We have a lounge/living room across from my bedroom on the 6th floor. It has huge windows and on a clear day you can get a great view of downtown and the surrounding areas. It's rare, but it's good. This morning as I walked out of my room, the sun was shining so brightly through those windows that it was reflecting in the hall. It caught my attention enough to go take a peek.

As I looked out the window at the clarity,  I thought about the fact that this is much like my own mind. My "view" here is different than it's ever been before, and it is good, but more often than not, it is still clouded. On certain days, I get glimpses of clarity, but on most days, it's just clouded. It's clouded by worry, anxiety, fear, selfishness, jealousy...the list goes on.

I have been in a clouded "funk" the past few weeks and although glimpses of clarity come, it's not long before I cloud them out again with an unkind thought or word, or worrying about tomorrow, or today for that matter.  As Paul says in Romans, the things you don't want to do, you do, and the things you want to do, you don't; it is sin living in me.

But maybe, just maybe, it is in that cloudiness that we are able to get clarity. If it weren't cloudy, we wouldn't know the clarity. It's in our sin that we see our need to recieve grace. If we didn't see the sin, then we wouldn't see the need for grace.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Romans 7: 15-25