Allow me a car metaphor, for a moment: think about driving across Kansas, and think about driving in the mountains of Colorado. The latter has far more exciting views, and often a great deal more danger. It’s also far slower – even when the speed limits are high, the roads are twistier and of necessity bend on themselves time and again to make it through the jutting tangle of the Rockies. Kansas is flat, boring, and has little of interest – but, in despite of all one’s perceptions, travel across the state is far quicker than travel through Colorado.

So Kansas is boring and travel in Colorado is a little slower, but more interesting. I think most of us, given the choice, would probably pick Colorado as a place to be driving. But in this life, we are not so much given a place to drive around in at our leisure as told, “Drive from California to New York.” Getting from the one place to the other requires us to drive through Colorado and Kansas. (Yes, I know you could skip Colorado by going north, but really: who would do that? Silly people, that’s who. Besides which, that route goes through Nebraska, and I’ve been to Nebraska: it’s no more interesting than Kansas, and maybe less.) On the other side of Kansas is, finally, the rolling hills and forests that run a couple hundred miles west of the Mississippi all the way out to the Atlantic. But you have to get through Kansas first.

So when you’re driving through Kansas, be grateful the speed limit is 70, and remember that however imperceptible the change may be, however motionless it may feel at times, you’re going somewhere. If you remember that, you might be freed up to enjoy the cornfields along the way, and see that they’re beautiful and interesting too, albeit in a far less striking way than the tip top curves of the Rockies.

I’ve driven across Kansas enough times, though, to sympathize: it’s hard work to see the corn as beautiful at mile 400. Keep trying. It’s worth it. God made corn fields, too.

One of my favorite books on marriage takes as its theme and thesis that marriage exists more to make us holy than to make us happy (though, in God’s infinite kindness it often offers us both holiness and happiness). The book is good, but I think the application is far broader: life is more about making us holy than making us happy.

Of course, we are happiest when we are seeking true holiness – true, soul-enriching delight in God alone – most earnestly. The challenge is that we rarely feel, in the moment by moment struggles of mundane living, the force of that truth. But that promise we can cling to: knowing God will satisfy us more truly than anything else. Every other substitute we offer ourselves in place of God will fail us. And so the great battle rages on, waged in our hearts and minds between the great Truth and the great Lie.

Our great hope, as a friend of mine preached in a sermon this past weekend, is this: we are – here and now, already – dead to sin and alive to Christ. We must keep becoming what we are becoming.