“Where morning dawns and evening fades
you call forth songs of joy”
(Psalm 65:8)
Reflection:
How easy it is to miss the beauty, the glory and the message of creation as we walk through it day by day.
Each morning is new and heralds a day that has never been before. The slowly lifting darkness moves away from the softly searching light revealing a morning of hope and potential. A pale and colourless sky is touched with deepening and breathless blue. Sleeping cloudbanks stir in wonder to the splashes of rose and gold and white as the dawn sweeps away the dullness with the magic of her sunlit brush. This is not the remnants of yesterday but a completely new and sparkling gift. In it I am alive, and God is real, and He is with me, and that is very good.
Bowed down with yesterday and crippled with the shadows of the past it is not always easy for us to see and to listen and to wonder in joyful awe. But if God gives to you the grace to pause and to feel the stirrings of something in you that responds to these lavish gifts then receive from Him what you can and take it with you as you struggle forward. We have so many burdens, worries and responsibilities but sometimes we need to hear a different call.
I meant to do my work today—
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand—
So what could I do but laugh and go?
(Richard Le Gallienne)
And then as sunset calls the labourer home departing day stretches back and paints the western skies with a last burst of passionate colour before letting out a long and silent sigh as she fades into the slumber of the night. But still, as twilight covers the working land, high in the sunlit sky the stately castles of the air sail in glorious and brilliant splendour until they too draw a curtain over today.
Is all this the mechanical results of some unstoppable process – or is there a great and majestic Artist still at work painting the beauty of His nature into the reality of our lives with a passion and love that longs for us to behold.
“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made”
(Romans 1:20)
Response:
Look and listen – listen to the birds as they greet the dawn and settle the sun – and wonder.
Prayer:
Lord can it be that You are not just watching all this on some giant screen but even now are involved in speaking even to me through the created expression of Your beauty and love. Help me Lord to see, to listen and to accept Your love. Amen.
———————–
The Soaring Eagle 