One of the wonderful things about a coastal town is the breathtakingly expansive nature of the ocean. Water stretches for miles in the distance, and I can see it all from where I am standing.

The same is true of the mountains.

I know I can’t see forever, even on a clear day, but it seems like I can.

But it’s the beauty of the other days that sticks with me, the foggy and cloud-filled ones.

This is High Street yesterday – a foggy morning that obscures everything that is more than a hundred feet away. I know what’s up the road – I lived just a few hundred yards from here for two decades – but I can’t see it.

Just across the street, Ladner Street was also wrapped in mystery:

There is beauty in the mystery of a partial view, just as there is a grandness to an unobscured view. I love both – one cannot be mistaken for the other, and seeing both is a glimpse of something more important and expansive than I can express in words.

Encounters with God, large and small, are more akin to the glimpses of life through fog or mist – beautiful, but in no way all-encompassing. This doesn’t mean that they are untrue or faulty, it just means that they are not complete. One person cannot behold God fully, and one person’s vision of God does not dictate or encompass all the visions of God that are possible. That’s not a problem – unless and until a beautiful and partial view is mistaken for a full one…

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.

I Cor. 13:12a