Every morning while on vacation, Brandon and I made it a point to rise as close to dawn as possible and then to go where we could witness the earth’s turn back toward the sun. Although I’ve gawked at many a sunset, this was the first time we’ve prioritized sunrise, that moment when the crest of the sun just breaks the horizon. We walked through the humid soup of South Carolina summer with a coffee in hand and sweat already pouring down our backs to greet the day and its capricious sky.
Every day begins the same, and yet there has never been the exact same sky, the dappled dawn ever-changing, ever-evolving, speckled with vapor brought together and dispersed by air currents and jet streams. The Teacher in Ecclesiastes says that we are each like this, a mist, a vapor, a smoke, here for this second and then lifted, til we are someday brought into union with the One whose breath has formed and separated sky from water.
There are moments when the light precedes sunrise and lingers after sunset, dawn and dusk illuminating the world with an array of colors reserved for beginnings and endings. The clouds glow pink and purple and gold, catching rays of light in their underbelly. It is the same way with our own beginnings and endings, sunrises and sunsets, births and deaths breaking like the first morning, as Cat Stevens says, making a way for the sacred to shine in a way we’re often blind to see. And yet it is this same sun, these same rays, this same radiant sky, all the day long.
Our entire lives glow with the bright streaks of grace, breath of God constant and constantly changing, meeting and greeting every weary traveler who turns his eye to the sky in wonder and awe. It is for each of us—vapor, mist, fleeting wisp of smoke—that same love binds every molecule together through every rising and fading day, spanning eternity. We are given these mornings and evenings, these sacred moments when the grace of God is loud, so that the same grace may be remembered and maybe even seen at 1 o’clock on a Tuesday, in the matching of socks, while shopping for eggplant and zucchini, the most ordinary of things still penetrated by God’s grace, still glowing with God’s love.
Find your way to a sunrise or sunset. Position yourself in your mind in that moment before the sun crests the horizon, just as the sun makes its rapid descent past the earth. It is not the sun that moves. God’s love is steadfast and bright, it penetrates the atmosphere, it charges our world, it makes life possible. We are the ones who are doing the turning. Let us turn toward that everlasting love.
This bright promise is for you.
Share this post