We were at an art show over the weekend.  It's an art show which we attend every year, year after year after year.  We always see something new.  After all, newness is the nature of art.  One thing that caught our eye this year was the work of an artist who worked in what is called mixed media, that is, using different types of painting materials to produce an image.
     One of the images this artist produced featured a row of trees stacked atop a hill, a sort of cloud and sun vista lying beyond.  Not a radically new choice for a work of art, of course, but the nature of the vista, portrayed as it was with a wild burst of sundry and diverse materials blended together, made me think of how most of us see our lives on this earth.  We all seek vistas, we all seek dreams, we all seek meanings to fill the years of our lives.  And we all come to see, eventually, that the roads to such things are often filled with chaos and uncertainty, mélanges of circumstance and whim, tangles of unseen difficulties that we frequently do not expect or anticipate.  Life is a mixture of everything, things that are good, things that are bad.  But it's all life, life in the world God has made.
     For even if the world were still in its perfected state, even if Adam and Eve had never sinned, unless the world offered the recondite and intrigue, it would not be much of a world.  Though we often recoil from pain, problems, and unknowing, we remain aware that without them life would not be the experience it is, a mystery, a beautiful, glorious, vexing, and inchoate mystery, a mystery grounded in the infinite--and personal--presence of God.
     After all, if we already knew, we have finished before we even start.