The Sunrise Was Enough

 


This morning I woke up with the strangest feeling.  It was a feeling of excitement and hope---a sense that there was something good about to happen.  I didn't know what to do with it, to be honest.  

I used to feel those kinds of feelings more often, but the last eighteen months have kind of pummelled them out of me.  So now when they come, they feel like strangers or uninvited guests.  

So, I went outside on my front porch as the dawn began to break and I looked up at the sky.  It was full of the most beautiful colors, made even more beautiful by the smattering of clouds that added hues of grey to the orange and yellow that burst into view with every passing moment.  

A part of me wondered, "If that was the thing that you were anticipating, would it be enough, just by itself?"  

It was an excellent question if I do say so myself.  The answer didn't come to me at that moment, and as I sit here and write, I am still not sure I have found it.  But I feel like I  have a hint.  Let me explain. 

I was poring over one of my devotional readings today, and the author included this verse from the Hebrew Scriptures that I re-phrased a bit here: 

Let us seek to know God;
    let us press on to know God.
As surely as the sun rises,
    God will appear;
God will come to us like the winter rains, 
    like the spring rains that water the earth. - Hosea 6:3

This verse got me thinking in a surprising way about the feeling I felt, and the sunrise, and the question about whether it was enough.  

I asked myself, "Could it be that all of what I was feeling wasn't attached to a single thing, but to something far greater, something bigger than I might have imagined?" 

I wondered to myself if perhaps the sunrise could be a sacrament of sorts---a sign and a symbol of a spiritual reality that I was able to see because I was actually open to experiencing the truth of it. 

And then I wondered if the reason I was so smitten by the verse from Hosea was that it gave me the words for the feeling I was trying to define.  

Because what I was feeling wasn't an aimless, rootless, reckless version of hope, quite the contrary.  It was grounded in something real. It was grounded in my constant longing for the touch of the Divine.  

In short, I wanted to see God.  I wanted to know that God was there, somewhere in the gloom of the morning.  I wanted to know that God was present in my life, at work at something glorious within me and through me. 

And so, with all that in mind, the answer to my question came to me, although it wasn't as much of an answer as it was a confirmation that the hope I felt wasn't some passing fancy.  

The sunrise was enough.  

It was enough because it revealed the wonder of the world around me, a world loved and cherished by the God who created, and keeps on creating.  It showed me that sometimes the anticipation and desire for God is in and of itself a hope-filled action. 

When we can live and move and breathe in the world with that kind of holy anticipation all of the time, we are then able to discover infinite reservoirs of hope and peace that we can draw from no matter what is happening around us.  

May your longing for God lead you to sacramental moments of awareness of what God is up to all around you, in you, and through you.  May you be sustained in the hope that this awareness brings.  

And may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you now and always. Amen.  


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