Keep Looking Up, Keep Looking Forward

When Adam and Eve partook of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they opened themselves and all of their descendants to the full gamut of possible experiences - light and dark, sweet and bitter, pleasant and painful, easy and hard. As we make our way through life we all go through peaks and valleys. This is true if we zoom in to the minute by minute or zoom out to years and decades. We swing from good mood to bad back to good. We go from failure to success back to failure and then back to success. We go through periods of ease and periods of terrifying difficulty. Since we don't have much of a choice on the particular landscape that we must navigate, what we are left with is our choice of perspective and attitude. We can choose to look up or to look down. We can choose to look forward, or to look back. When we are climbing the peak of happiness, when we look up and we look forward, we are filled with hope and anticipation of reaching that summit. When we get to the top we have two choices. We can continue to look up to Heaven with gratitude for the grace and mercy that allowed us to reach this particular peak of happiness and fulfillment. Or we can look down and dread our descent back into the next valley, or look down and back and see how far we've already come and feel jealousy and pride and bitterness that all of our hard work will seemingly go to waste and we will cling to that peak and demand that we be allowed to stay there forever and never have to be challenged again. But even if God granted our unhealthy and unreasonable demand, we would grow bored and listless. We are made for the struggle. We are designed to have knowledge of good and evil, easy and hard, fun and boring, happy and sad, peaceful and chaotic. If we vanquished the struggle between good and evil completely then we would become unbalanced. We would only have half the fruit, half the knowledge. We can't become like God only by eating the good part of the fruit. Besides, as great as any one particular peak might seem, it is barely a molehill compared to the next mountain. We are climbing a mighty mountain range on our path to perfection. For every peak we climb, the next will be higher still. And yes, after every climb we must descend once again into the vales of tears and the valleys of the shadow of death, but if we keep looking up and keep looking forward then whether we are at the bottom of the pit or the top of the mountain we can be filled with humility and gratitude and hope.