I have said often (as the poor
friends who hear all my smart remarks five times probably know) that God smiles
indulgently as his children smear oils and watercolors on canvas, and then
proceeds to use water vapor, colliding helium atoms, hot and cold air currents,
and planetary rotation to paint something like this… every twenty-four hours.
Less, if you count the sunrises and sunsets. It also changes every
second that you watch it, looks different depending on what longitude you happen
to be at, and can’t actually be fully captured by a photograph. At least, that’s
what my shutterbug friends tell me.
Most people like sunshine better
than clouds. Bright, luminescent days full of deep green grass and deep blue
sky and deep, clear water to drink as it sparkles. Those are the days for fun,
for picnics, football, painting, flying kites. Cloudy days are for scrubbing
floors and listening to old lugubrious country songs. Even on mostly sunny
days, clouds are when your mother shivers and reaches for her second sweater.
Nobody likes clouds.
But did you ever stop to think that
without clouds, sunsets wouldn’t be nearly as glorious? They cover the light,
sure, but in the right place they can reflect it, refract it, and produce more
colors than we have names for. Rose. Purple. No, pink. Rosurplink?
Life is like that. Who wants clouds
in their life? A lost job. A sick relative. Addiction. Depression. Loneliness.
Pressure. It can seem like they cover
you and suck all the joy out of life, all the light and warmth out of your
picnic. You shiver and reach for that second sweater, thinking something like, “Ah,
how the Lord in his anger has set the Daughter of Zion under a cloud!” And
then, if you’re watching, if you’re standing in exactly the right place, the
sun behind the clouds makes an appearance. And the troubles change color. “Count
it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know
that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” So wrote another fellow
named James. And he was, if I may freely translate, telling all you sunshiny
people that you should ask God to send in the clouds. Otherwise, where is your
testimony? Who tells others of their thankfulness for how God got them through
the blissful Hobbiton days of life? It is in the Paths of the Dead and the
slopes of Caradhras and Orodruin where stories are made. If the sun always
shone uninterrupted, where would your sunsets come from? This is how God works.
Darkness turned to glory. Crosses turned to honor. Clouds… turned to sunsets. Clouds
are what make the relatively ordinary circumstance of the sun dipping below the
horizon into something you pull over and watch until it stops.
Actually, it technically never
stops at all. Sunlight is always angling off of some atmosphere somewhere. God just ceaselessly speaks
the word “sunset” (or sunrise, depending on your point of view) and there is
sunset. And God sees that the sunset is good. “See, look what I painted you.
Right there. Just for you and the few hundred in the right spot to see it. Darkness
made into even better light. I even gave you those wonderful eyes to see it
with. Look, look, before it’s gone! You missed it? Well, don’t fret. I’ll do it
again tomorrow.”
