Upside Down Reflections

I am still trying to recover, mentally, spiritually, and physically from an amazing mission trip to Maine. Whenever you have such a powerful experience like that, seeing God move, watching lives be changed, welcoming home prodigals, it can be hard to go back to normal life. Having 2 kids helps, after all they don’t care how I am feeling, I am Dad and that carries a lot of expectations. But, all of it, even a slow detox, has been great. What the trip did leave me with, however, is a sense that often my struggle with understanding my life is the result of upside down reflections. In Maine one day, while we were waiting on some tools, I walked over to the lake and noticed how clear it was. The water was still and the sky seemed to extend to the water itself. I took some pictures and then decided to turn my camera upside down and take a picture that way too just to see how it turned out. This was the result.

I have been taken with this picture since I actually saw it. At first glance you can’t quite tell what is going on. Then you think I flipped around the picture digitally. But, in reality the picture is exactly as it was intended to be. You can distinctly make out the cloud shapes, see the outline of the mountains and even catch the blue of the sky. But, the reflection isn’t quite the same. The reflection lacks the overwhelming expanse of the sky. You can see the bottom of the lake as you look closely, covered with smooth stones weathered over time be the natural rhythms of the water. The blue, the light, the clouds, they aren’t really there either, just poor reflections of the real thing.

Sometimes life is like that, an upside down reflection. Everything seems to be right, or almost right, but in reality it is just a reflection. The water that day was pretty calm, but if a wind picked up, the reflection would really be hard to see. All those images would be lost. When we live our lives outside of God’s will, when we make our own path and determine to make the world what we want it, upside down reflections are the result. The infinitely expanding hope of the stratosphere is replaced by a rocky lake bottom mere inches away and if a storm hits, all those images are lost amid the waves. Sometimes it takes getting away from the norm, away from routine, and removing distractions to get right side up again. I pray that is what this trip did for me, and even more so for the youth who have professed transformation because of it.

How about you? How is life looking? Do you ever feel like you are standing on your head? Take some time, change your routine, and give God space to right you again…