dawn
I sit in the hammock swing on our screened porch, waking, cradling my coffee cup in my hands, watching the steam curl and rise out of that mug toward the dark, lacy outline of the evergreen trees bordering our neighbor’s yard. I smile gently at those trees, at the way they look right now, black as night, backlit by the beaming of the new day, and I think about how that beautiful morning light reveals the darkness still clinging to the earth.
I have “a thing” about light, am drawn to it like a moth to flame, and so, I have filled my house with twinkling trees and fairy lights like fireflies blinking. When big bruised storm clouds drift in heavy and hide the sun, I walk around the house turning on all the lamps, muttering about needing more light.
In the windowsill, leggy poinsettias Zoe rescued a few Christmases ago from the break room at work turn their now green leaves flat against the window. Every so often I spin the plants around to admire their deep chlorophyll, thinking about how plants absorb energy from light. I like to watch over days as the poinsettias slowly turn their pretty leaves back toward the window. Life really turns on the turn and re-turn toward light.
God calls His people trees, oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord, branches, made to live on the vine and in the light, meant to flourish by the living water, tended by God’s own hands to bear fruit. God thought of us, His plantings, when He made the first garden; when He made the earth and let the new soil fall through His cosmic fingers, and maybe that’s why the first thing God created was light; with His first let there be. He wanted it right out in front of us every day, how we need Him first, because Word is, God is light. Christ Himself said, “I am the light of the world.”
It’s like I’m holding seeds in my palm: light reveals darkness; I need light; life turns toward light; God is light. What, I wonder, is God planting in me today?
From where I sit, curled, I turn and watch the coming of the new day, thinking about how the light always tells a short story about what God plans to do. There are those days when it feels as though darkness has settled in the trees, as though the night has come to stay. There are those days when the brokenness of life falls in one hard layer after another. Kevin and I have certainly had more than one of those days, when we look wild at each other as together we fall off the edge of yet another impossible situation, when it’s easy to believe the only truth is that life is always hard, that he and I are always running away from shadows. There are those days, but it’s morning, and I sit watching the light swallow up the darkness, holding these seeds.
I read it in a scientific journal, that light is a messenger to all living things, that every living cell responds to light. I know it’s true, because slowly, I begin to unfold.
My finger rests on the actual truth, Light on the page, and I look back down to read, asking, Lord, how shall I respond to this?
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
Lamentations 3:22-23
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
Every day, God’s hesed, His endless, faithful love and tender mercy and compassionate kindness, shines new, illuminating the darkness, swallowing up the darkness still clinging to me. His hesed, that’s the light toward which I turn, the light that fills me with energy—His energy, not mine–for another day here. The morning is its own re-turn, as the story begins again with this light shining in the darkness. Day and night, night and day, since creation, the two have been divided, set to repeat the whole tale again and again and again: Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
As all this blooms, and the day sprouts, I see through the window the light flash on over our kitchen table, watch Adam sleepy-wander into view. I watch him stop, just a beat, and look up at the light, and I think about how, apart from any conscious thought, Adam’s body responds, how the retinas in his eyes tell his brain to stop producing melatonin for sleep, to start cranking out stimulating cortisol. Over the years, I’ve been astounded to realize how many changes in me happen outside of my own consciousness, how I respond to God without even thinking about it, just by turning toward Him. I don’t really even have to know exactly what He’s planting today, just that He is planting something.
I could count on my hands the things I believe God will do because He promised, could count on my hands what I look forward to and run out of fingers, but here is one:
One day we won’t need a sun or a moon, because the glory of God will be the light of the world, and Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, will be its lamp. One day, there won’t be any darkness left, no storm clouds, no night, no sin, no death, no shame, no loss, no pain, only the brilliance of God’s steadfast, forever love infusing and radiating from absolutely everything. In fact, it’s already happening. Already God has made the light of the knowledge of His glory shine from the hearts of His people; already God’s face shines upon us and gives us peace. He has said, in fact, that the path I’m on and on and on, so long as it turns and re-turns toward Him, shines brighter and brighter until full day. Just like the light of dawn.
