High Angle

God understands the way to [wisdom]

    and he alone knows where it dwells,

for he views the ends of the earth

    and sees everything under the heavens. (Job 28:23-24)

When I was a kid (and OK, so I still do this sometimes), I used to look down at the ground and imagine I was in an airplane miles above the earth looking down at a huge expanse of land. I would imagine that clumps of grass were forests, and that a bit of sandy ground was a vast desert. Pine cones were giant boulders, and tree roots great mountain ranges.

When I did this as a child, something magical happened, something that doesn't happen so much now that I'm an adult: The door to my imagination would open. Before I knew it, I'd conjured up the names of villages and deserts and mountain ranges, and I'd thought of the peoples of the various areas, and imagined that this person from the grass-green village was travelling across the sandy desert toward the Great Yellow Tree (a dandelion) or the Shining Tunnel (a discarded Coke can). Sometimes the person would be an ant I was watching, and sometimes it would be someone that only existed in my mind.

It was so cool, knowing that I could see the Great Yellow Tree, or the Shining Tunnel, or even Rotten Mountain (an old pine cone) just ahead fo me, knowing that it was far in the distance from my imaginary traveler. The traveler didn't know it was there, didn't know what to expect, but I did, because I could see what was ahead.

Back when I used to write a lot more fiction than I do now, I had a similar experience: My character had no idea what was going to happen in the next chapter, or 5 or 10 chapters down the road, but I did. And even though my character might feel afraid or despondent or even hopeless, I knew that he or she would be okay. Or that, even if things weren't going to turn out OK, there would be some sort of resolution in the end.

God "views the ends of the earth / and sees everything under the heavens." We only see a sliver; he can see all. And even though that giant obstacle in front of us seems insurmountable, God can see that it's really only a twig or a pebble. And even though we feel that we're in the depths of despair, God can see that it's just the shadow of a tree darkening our path for the moment.

In Job 26, Job speaks of God's great power, and then says:

Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways,

    and how small a whisper do we hear of him!

    But the thunder of his power who can understand?” (Job 26:14)

We can't see everything, and we understand even less. But He sees, and his wisdom encompasses all.

The ground--maybe 3' by 3' in real life, but a vast wilderness in my imagination.