As the Heavens Speak...

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they reveal knowledge.

They have no speech, they use no words;

no sound is heard from them.

Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world. Psalm 19: 1-4

My devotional reading this morning directed me to this portion of Psalm 19 and it made me think of an experience I had few nights ago. It was nothing big, really…but oftentimes God speaks loud messages in a soft voice.

That night I was stressed out…not an uncommon state of being for me…I’m sorry to say…and the boys were watching a movie downstairs which I really don’t care about, so I decided it was time for me to go to my room to chill. It was shortly past nine in the evening when I went upstairs and I realized there was still light coming in the windows from outside so I didn’t turn on the lamp in my bedroom. I sat by one of my windows and I looked out…at that moment, the sight outside my window immediately transported me back over twenty years ago to a summer I spent in Clarion as a was attending the university there.

The details of that summer are very fuzzy in my mind now, but what is permanently engraved in my mind is the view I had from the room I lived in at that time. It was a room on the top floor of an all-girls dorm and it had a gorgeous view of the western mountains. That was back when I had just begun to experience the joy of the long days of summer. In Panama, regardless of the month of the year, nighttime comes down quickly and hard on us like a heavy blanket at around 6:45 so by 7pm it is pitch dark outside. So, to me, having sunlight at 9pm was and still is a marvelous perk of this neck of the woods.

The thing was that from that solitary room I discovered the beauty of sunsets. Not only the beauty of spectacular sunsets with an explosion of color…but mostly of quiet dusks in which you can distinguish a pale orange glow along the line of the horizon with shades of blue that go from light to really dark as you ascend into the eastern skies. I remember sitting by the window alone, just witnessing such a marvelous sight wishing to burn it in my retina and imprint it on the walls of my memories so the image would never fade away…for I knew someday I’d be gone from Western PA never to see such miracle again.

As life would have it, I did return to this side of the world and I have thoroughly enjoyed many spectacular sunsets…but I rarely have had time to contemplate the quiet ones…the business of life gets on the way and it is hard to spare the time that takes to sit by a window and watch the last lights of the sun shutting down as the day turns into night…

That’s why that evening was so special. While my boys were still busy watching a movie downstairs I was able to just sit…be still…and allow God to speak to me in the quiet declaration of His glory by the Heavens He has created. And for that I am most grateful. At a moment of intense stress God gave me the gift of stillness so I could once again witness the speech that the skies put forth without words just for me to hear in my heart.



That night I remembered the crucial need that I have to seek Him first and to let go of all the worries of the world because He is on His throne and He is taking care of me and my loved ones…if I only had the eyes to see it and the heart to believe it.