The morning sun feels warm against my face. My eyes glance at the new empty playground a safe shock absorbing green with large muted yellow or gold stars, crescent moon, and sun. Shiny metallic modern art pieces can also be seen.
An individual’s faith is sometimes like a playground. How faith is utilized and integrated within a person’s life can be illuminating.
Our faith provides our morality, our sense of right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice. Our faith explains both our mortality and our quest for entrance to God’s kingdom.
Believers strive and struggle to create lives of goodness, fairness, love, and mercy. Believers acknowledge that both sacrifice and diligence are required. Believers accept that creating and maintaining such a life might be difficult. Believers accept the idea that failure accompanies this quest.
Faith offers hope.
Sin and invitations to sin surround us. Faith offers a beacon, a path away from sin.
Baptism cleanses us, removes sin from us. We have to walkaway, we can not look back. Like Orpheus faith leads us from the darkness, from the gloom. Sin, however, wants us to stop, to glance back, to remember something which should not be remembered. Past sins often call to us, often suggest that we are invincible, suggest that “this will be the last time.” Those who are learned and courageous in their faith can ignore this trap on Memory Lane. Others get caught at the corner of Memory and Vain. Failure is not forever. Faith encourages us to continue moving toward God, to continue striving to be better people concerned with both our immediate world and the universal world equally, with compassion and kindness for all.
Failure is not bad. We can learn from our mistakes and become closer to God.
My eyes are accustomed to the sunlight. Sunglasses are often uncomfortable and forgotten by me. The wind blows. I stand up, and lean against the slowly rusting fence. My hands grip the slowly rusting pipe attached to the fence. For a moment, I imagine that I am flying. Nine floors up, my chest leans beyond the fence. Four shiny metal cars all painted in the similar nondescript grey wait to be picked up. The three stars and the crescent moon invite a journey beyond this place, to another playground on a distant planet. The metallic jungle gym waits for arms to swing and legs to climb.
And I think of Mesopotamia and I think of Michelangelo.
I look at the three stars, the crescent moon, and the sun and I wonder, simply, quietly wonder.
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