Photovotional — Heaven’s Slide

(A PHOTOVOTIONAL is my term for a photo accompanied by a related devotional)

I’ve always loved sunbeams, they prompt me to think of heaven. They’re lighted pathways spanning heaven and earth. Or perhaps they’re better described as silver slides, like the kinds kids slide down, maybe for playful angels?

This photo was taken one very foggy morning when I was walking along the edge of the soybean field behind our place. The sun was struggling to break through, and it did so several sunbeams at a time. I rushed back to the house to retrieve my camera, then back out to the bean field.

We yearn for the transcendent. We instinctively know there is more to life than buttering our toast, doing a load of wash, driving here, there, and back again, shuffling papers at a desk, cleaning a house that will be dirty and dusty again a week from now, or manufacturing something that will be in a landfill in twenty years. It’s not that the day-to-day details of life are unimportant, they aren’t. God has anointed them as part of what it means to be human on a daily basis. Still, we know there’s more, and, for me, sunbeams remind me that there’s more, far more.

It’s good, while we’re living the details of each day, to maintain a heavenly perspective, an eternal view. Like the child who glances at a parent from the sandbox or the stage to see if they’re paying attention or for their approval, so we have a Heavenly Father who gives us His full attention. We can know we are part of His divine plans and that we have His mighty help. We can pray the psalmist’s prayer, “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.” (Psalm 17:8)

While we’re here on earth we’re to embrace all that God has for us to do.  But in the doing of it we’re to never lose sight of heaven’s perspective.  Sunbeams are just one way God reminds me of this!  “The heavens proclaim his righteousness, and all peoples see his glory.” (Psalm 97:6)