The Message
Imagine with me that someone handed you 15 snapshots, frozen in time, from Jurassic Park. Could you figure out the entire plot of the movie? Could you piece everything together? Depending on which snapshots, you could probably have a sense of the movie, but the drama, the tension, the anxiety -- much of that would be lost.
Someone described the Gospels as snapshots of the Kingdom of God. We get glimpses, samples, of what the Kingdom is like, but we can't have the entire picture -- we only end up with pieces.
Jesus is trying to help us understand the Kingdom, but in this world, we cannot capture the fullness of the Kingdom. It's like trying to taste a milkshake by watching it be made, or trying to listen to a symphony by reading the notes, one by one. We fall short.
So when Jesus teaches us to pray, he's trying to lead us into a life that depends completely on God. He's pointing and encouraging and reminding us that God is everything we could want and everything we need and that there is so much more than we imagine, but we simply cannot wrap our minds around the immensity of the Gospel.
So let us look for the snapshots, and study them, and then give thanks that God is so much greater, that heaven is so much richer, that true life is so much more wondrous than we can imagine. What a gift it is to trust in a God who has made good things here on earth and then filled heaven with even better.
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