There it was. Fog. Those thick clouds filled with tiny water droplets, suspended in the atmosphere near the earth’s surface, that restrict visibility down to nothing, blindingly so.

The day we visited Deception Pass, smoke from wild fires burning across two states and from our neighbor to the north, found us in an almost ethereal place. Wedged between the elements of the heavens and the earth.

Looking out across the bay, was like watching the back drop on a stage change from one scene to the next. As smoke and fog merged, the sky became a muted, non defined color and seeing beyond it was impossible. In my mind, I knew what I was looking for – a strait of water separating two islands – but my eyes just couldn’t see it.

According to history, this was a hard area for explorers to find and map until June 1792. They encountered dramatic tidal flows and whirlpools, and many wrong turns before finding the inlet now known as Skagit Bay. The area also become infamous for its human smuggling of migrant Chinese people for local labor in the 1880s.

As I took the photo above, just for moment I ‘saw’ those early explorers and Chinese migrants. They didn’t know what lay ahead of them, they couldn’t see where they were going. Explorers lost their lives, boats were wrecked, some turned back, others kept pushing ahead until they found what they were searching for. Some Chinese migrants never saw the place they were being taken to, others were pushed through at the hands of other men to labor and live and pass on a story.

Life has a way of throwing us ‘deception pass’ moments. Sometimes all you can do is keep pushing through, keep looking beyond the ‘haze’.

Then, one day it will clear and you will see what you have always known was there.

(1 Corinthians 13:12. The Message Paraphrase) “We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it as clearly as God sees us, knowing Him directly just as He knows us.”