All is smoke

We are living in a time of trouble. Genocide. Wildfires. Corruption. Plane crashes. Twenty-four carat devastation. Even when optimism takes center stage, trouble is waiting in the wings.

Trouble is a guarantee. Our world knows trouble like the moon knows the light of the sun. It’s how the world works. Take the trouble away and we’re in trouble. We are so used to trouble that it would traumatize us to wake up tomorrow to a trouble-free world.

Trouble is a faithful frenemy. It is the threadbare pair of shoes that we hate to wear but we can’t afford new ones. We’re stuck with these busted, off-brand sneakers. They are wearing out, and they are wearing us out. But we have no choice. So we lace them up and limp around. We hate them, but they’re all we have, and that’s how it is.

That’s how it’s always been. Ever since the serpent slithered up to Eve in Eden, everything under the sun has been bee-lining toward destruction. Eve gets a bad rap, by the way. She only did what we all would have done. She acted on her deepest inner longings. She didn’t eat the fruit because she was physically hungry. Her hunger pangs were in her soul. This is still our plight today.

We long for unspeakable joy. Instead, we get unspeakable tragedy. We long for unconditional love. Instead, we get unloving conditions. We long for everlasting life. Instead, we get ever-present death. We long for justice. Instead, injustice just is. We long for solace. Instead, we suffer. 

We are longing for home, for Eden, the way it was before the slithering serpent. After thousands of years, this world still doesn’t feel like home. To think that it ever will is to live in a perpetual fantasy. This earth is not our homeland. It is a wilderness, and we are sojourners in it. Trying to find our way back home.

And now, in our sojourning, we must do what Eve was unwilling to do. We must sit with our longings. Feel the heart-aching loss. Embrace the dizzying confusion. Hold space for the tension that suspends us between hope and despair. 

Like Eve, we know now that the fruit is spoiled and the garden is gone. All that is left is hevel. Hevel is the Hebrew word for smoke. It’s the word that Solomon uses in Ecclesiastes to describe everything in life. All is smoke, he says. When you buff away the fatalism, this expression shines with truth.

All is smoke.

We see things, but when we try to take hold of them, there’s nothing there. Unlimited money, fame, sex, success. There is no substance there, only smoke.

But if all is smoke, then all is smoke. The things that bring pleasure and the things that cause pain. Loss is as substance-less as gain. It is not what you can take hold of that defines your life; it’s who has taken hold of you. Scripture is blunt about this.

If you have found Christ, you have found the secret. You have found the assurance that one day hevel itself will go up in smoke and a glorious light will shine through. Christ in us is our hope of glory.

Trouble is a guarantee. Jesus promised us as much. But trouble is temporary. It will disappear like vapor. And until that day, we long, and we wait, and we live in the tension, with the assurance that our glory is coming. 

The Apostle Paul expresses this with great eloquence in Romans chapter 8. He describes what it will be like to finally go home. And he assures us that “what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later” (‭‭Romans‬ ‭8‬:‭18‬ ‭NLT). 

As we sojourn, our homeland is in the side view mirror—closer than it appears. And one day we will go home. We will wake up to a trouble-free world. And it will not surprise us, because all along we knew the truth: we were in trouble, but the trouble was never in us.