Simple Clarity?

(The Noble Heart eLetter by Gary Barkalow)

I remember one evening watching a nature show about lions in Africa.  It was one of those amazing productions where you observed a lion's life from birth through adulthood.  I watched the lion as a cub rolling in the grass, wrestling with his siblings, pouncing on his father, his mother grooming him.  As the cub got older, I watch him on his initial hunts with some success, but mostly failure.  In the lion's later life, he found a mate and had his own cubs.  His days consisted of guiltlessly resting in the shade in the heat of the day, confidently hunting for food and valiantly defending his family from predators.  Something about the simple clarity of his life and the sense of "being", untouched by the nagging, shaming question of, "who am I" and "what should I be doing with my life" stirred a type of jealousy in me.  It wasn't necessarily a simple life that I was wanting, but instead it was his simple clarity - he was just being what he was ...a lion.  If we were created to be something, to do something, to contribute something why is it so hard then to figure out what that is?
 
In C.S. Lewis', The Chronicles of Narnia, we read of a great prince who had been imprisoned under an enchantment by a witch.  While under her spell Prince Rilian would lose all recollection of who he was and where he came from - "while I was enchanted I could not remember my true self."  And during his brief moments of clarity, being told that those moments were actually times of insanity, the prince would be voluntarily bound to a chair until he would come back into his "right mind" which he later described as a "heavy, tangled, cold, clammy web of evil magic." 
 
This is how life feels for most of us - we are lost in a fog of confusion and dullness with brief moments of clarity and desire which seem so hard to hold on to.  And when we are able to capture those moments that have a ring of authenticity about them, we quickly start to doubt their legitimacy.  Could we be under some web of evil magic?

 

"I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the wonderful future he has promised to those he called. I want you to realize what a rich and glorious inheritance he has given to his people."  Eph. 1:18 NLV

"I press on (strenuously pursue) to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me."  Phil. 3:12 NIV
 
In the pursuit with you,

 

Gary