It's a blustery autumn day outside, frustrated with hail, peeking blue skies, and fragile leaves hanging on for what's left of their dear death. Today is filled with complexities, paradoxes, and promises. Walking out of joy and into fear, into possibilities struck down by impossibilities. We open the vault that protects hearts, leaving the door open to vagrants and tremors of the nasty kind. I lean over the table in our office, breathing deeply, feeling the weight on my shoulders. It's going to be okay, she says. I say the same thing later, after we pray, then she leaves closing the office door quietly behind her.

But we don't know. Life is a paradox in motion. Certainty lasting only as long as the euphoria does, fear present as long as the promises return void.

Years ago I heard an exhortation on the sixth chapter of Isaiah. We all know about a prophet who saw God, a man of unclean lips, among a people of unclean lips. An ordinary man amongst ordinary people thrust into the presence of the Lord, seated high and lifted up. He saw God. In this sermon, though, the speaker let his tongue wander to the angels present there too, their sole vocation to shout "Glory to God in the Highest. The Whole Earth is filled with His Glory!"

What are we doing with life?

Even with all our schedules, meetings, lattes, lofty ambitions and laziness, certainly not that.

I am thinking about the ordinary recently. Things that feel so normal that we've lost sight of the extraordinary. The super-ordinary. The out of the ordinary. I am thinking about how to get a grasp on this, all of this, and still call it good. Because that is extraordinary in practice. That is somehow what makes the difference. He already knows we are feeble, we are human, we with unclean lips. He never said for Isaiah to call it like it wasn't.

And I don't know if this is making sense, I'm not sure it matters -- I am a person of unclear thoughts and I live among a people of disorientation and limitations.

But we are learning to see God, to say Glory in the Highest, even when we are at our lowest.

When we are near death with this life, when we're hanging on, but barely, and when we are pushed from all sides.

Someone, somewhere, is employed by eternal praise and we take our cue from them.

Glory in the paradox. Glory in the frustration. Glory in the pain. Glory in the middle and glory in the end too. Glory in brokenness and glory when, at long last, all the promises are Yes and Amen. Glory when we will join the ranks of our heavenly counterparts shouting singularly "Glory to You in the highest. For all of this, everything, all of it, is filled with Your glory."