It’s a cloudy, misty, damp morning out there. Due to daylight saving time, it isn’t light out yet even though it’s after 7am. I say it isn’t light out, but if you’ve ever lived in a city, you know that it never truly is dark outside. The lights of the city make the night something more like a continual deep twilight rather than truly a night.
I took a friend of mine out to Western Kansas once. We went out for a one-day meeting. Due to the distance in travel, we went out the day before and spent the night out on a ranch owned by another friend. The ranch was about 15 miles from the nearest town, which itself was small (around 5,000 population). That time happened to also be the time of the new moon, so there was no moonlight.
I turned off the headlights of the pickup. The darkness immediately enveloped us in a mighty wave. We felt closed in and close. We got out of the pickup and literally had to feel our way into the house. The darkness clung to us all the way to the door and was scattered only when we flipped the light switch inside.
My friend commented on the totality of the darkness. Although I had lived in the city for awhile at that time, I was not unfamiliar with the kind of darkness we were experiencing. There are places in rural America where the only light at night truly is the light of the stars. If you’re older and your eyes don’t adjust well to the dark, you have kind of a hard time navigating in that environment and you truly appreciate any…ANY…light.
When our eyes did adjust, the darkness seemed to fly away and give rise to a million points of light (to borrow a phrase from a certain President) as thousands of stars and the Milky Way spread out overhead. There were stars everywhere. No part of the sky was without a point of light. We were seeing what civilizations thousands of years ago saw.
I miss that kind of experience. The city environment seems to modify what mother nature intended, and it never seems quite as cold, windy, or dark as it is where there are very few or no humans. We muck up the experience with buildings, lights, and concrete. For some reason, we think we can make it better, but it never seems to work out that way.
When you get a chance, enjoy what God has provided for you in the most pristine environment possible. Relish the dark. Experience the wind. Feel the cold. Face the stars. Know who you are.
1 comment:
The exchange student we host are from large cities (well large to us). (They call their city of 50,000 a village.) They are amazed at the number of stars in the sky. Everyone of them has commented that they have never seen so many stars as they have while staying with us. We point out the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, The Sisters and Venus. They are amazed.
And they see all this even though we have one of those yardlights that comes on automatically. My Dad never did want one of those. The yardlight we had had to be flicked on manually. He didn't want his heavenly view disturbed by one of those "city lights."
Our God is indeed an awesome God.
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