There are times...

For many years I have admired deeply the life and writings of Amy Charmichael, a Christian missionary to India, who lived a life of compassion and spiritual depth that many never reach. While in college, I emersed myself in her writings and poetry and still find them very inspirational and challenging. My favorite of her writings is a short and simple book entitled "If." I find myself going back to this book over and over again to be challenged in spirit and character. Reading today, I came across the familiar and comforting words opening 'Part I':

"There are times when something comes into our lives which is charged with love in such a way that it seems to open the Eternal to us for a moment, or at least some of the Eternal Things, and the greatest of these is love.
It may be a small and intimate touch upon us or our affairs, light as the touch of the dawnwind on the leaves of the tree, something not to be captured and told to another in words. But we know that it is our Lord. And then perhaps the room where we are, with its furniture and books and flowers, seems less "present" than His Presence..."

Miss Charmichael captured so beautifully and aptly the truth that we, living in this world wrapped up in time and material things, rarely allow to slip into our consciousness. Not that we don't think about eternity or eternal things, but how often do we realize the eternality of this very moment? Bound by the fetters of the sunrise and sunset, how often do we sit still and allow ourselves to be aware of the vastness and greatness that not only surrounds the 'furniture and books and flowers' in the room were we sit, but all of time and eternity infinitely beyond this moment forever and ever, that greatness that is in fact, more real than the very things we perceive around us. As she says, it is the "small and intimate touch" that opens us up to knowing God's nearness. God does not really come near...He is always near. Eternity is always upon us. We simply fail to recongnize it because we do not take the time to notice that "small and intimate touch" or to simply breathe in the "dawnwind" moving gently through the leaves.