We're pretty unique creatures. We're mortal, but we have eternity written on our hearts. We're sinners, yet a holy God calls us to be His own. We live in an interesting story that's still in the telling.

Just the same, we delude ourselves with books, movies and the news; we channel our longing for real-living into a subdued existence, living through others. We forget what surrounds us. We forget the beauty, love, miracles, and all-around spice of life. We forget who we are--people cherished by an Almighty God.

I wonder. What if all those blockbusters are miniatures of one truly great drama? What if the clashes of good and evil on screens are shadows of the clash that takes place every day, and we are simply too asleep to notice?

This morning I stumbled over something in a book. I was reading a journalist's story about tracking down his relatives who were lost in the Holocaust---I wasn't quite expecting to read something jarring about God and His sovereignty.

The author, Daniel Mendelsohn was writing about the Inquisition, an event that foreshadowed the WWII Holocaust. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain, killing about 100,000 in the process. Many Jews fled--and a great majority of those Jews emigrated to Thessaloniki, Greece. There, in 1942 (almost a palindrome to the 1492 expulsion) the descendants of those Sephardi were annihilated in concentration camps. From Madrid, to Thessaloniki, to Auchwitz--it was unspeakably tragic.

I found myself intertwined with this story as well. My mother's family claims Sephardi descent. We can trace our roots to Spanish Jews who fled after the expulsion. Instead of following the rest of the crowd, however, they joined a tiny fraction of Spanish Jews who illegally immigrated to the New World (what was then Nuevo Leon, Mexico.)

What would've happened if they immigrated to Thessaloniki? What caused my ancestors to choose the New World over Greece? I don't know why they came to Mexico, where they remained under the still-present threat of execution for their Jewishness. But the entire set of "what if's" that follow cause me to marvel at God's sovereignty. As a result, my family's only brush with the Holocaust has been through museums, books, movies and sympathy. We never faced that horror ourselves.

Every day, we awaken to a far greater drama than we can imagine. We live with the reality that God died for us. We exist with a knowledge that He is currently preparing a home for us to live in with Him. Unlike so many others, we have the opportunity to delve into a personal friendship with our Maker. What could possibly be more splendid? What could possibly induce us to forget it?