sunsets through a microscope
I’m obsessed with the sun going down, in case you haven’t gathered.
There's something about the change of color, the slow fade from the light to dark, that final goodbye to the day. The totally unnecessary explosion of color reminds me every time of how totally unnecessary it is for God to pour out grace. Necessary for our well-being, yes, but he has no need for our salvation. The color and majesty of it all just brings a physical representation of how he’s never too far away to the front of my mind, so I like to seek out a sunset whenever I can. Every now and then I’ll set aside an evening to go watch one. They’re better than a movie, seriously.
Unless it’s overcast. Or there’s a storm.
Then my reminder of how close God is just seems to go away with the arrival of the dark barrier between me and that promise that he’s there, and that he’s making beautiful things just for me. Funny how quick that happens. Things are going good, we’re on track for a solid day and as long as we get what we feel we’re entitled to, but if that one thing falls through the day is ruined. For me, it doesn’t matter if the day was incredible, down to hitting every green light on the way to "my spot" to watch the sun sink down. If I miss that sunset because of some dumb clouds the day wasn’t worth it. Or at least that’s how it feels sometimes, ya know?
I think I can make this blog short and straightforward, because a really simple concept is on my mind right now. That concept is this:
The sunset still happens behind the clouds.
If I can't see a sunset, especially if it's been a long day, I'm bummed out because the sunset isn't happening to me. I'm in the dark, literally. But then if I sit down and zoom out, if I could hop on a plane and get above the clouds there for a minute, I'd suddenly be happy because I'd see that the beautiful colors are actually still there, just blocked.
Easy metaphor, huh?
Clouds/storms = dark times, hard life, stuff like that. Oversimplified, yes. But I feel like this concept is still valid. We're in the middle of a painful time, a bad day, whatever, and people don't understand because they're not in the middle of the clouds. They say, "why can't you open your eyes and look at the beauty around you?" But there are those clouds. I think it's an important thing to acknowledge, though, when that's our situation. How can we know where to go if we don't know where we are? That's one of my most constant battles, where I'll take a bad situation and make it worse by shrugging it off. Andy Mineo hit me hard when he said "...'Cause when you bury emotions, you bury them alive. They only come back stronger, somewhere later in your life..." So why not just address them instead of burying?
The flip side of the suckyness of being in the darkness is, when we're in the middle of muck, we have the assurance that a sunset is still happening. The best part is that we'll get to see another sunset. Soon. Have you thought about what clouds are? They're vapor. nothing more. you could run your hand through through them. Just because there's a lot of vapor doesn't make it any more solid, in the context of clouds. I guess rain could happen, hail at the worst, but my point is the clouds here. A bunch of water that isn't even heavy enough to be held down by gravity is getting in the way of us seeing the beauty in life. It's cool because God can whisp away the clouds or dry up the rain whenever we really think about his glory. Or, if we're too in the thick of it to grasp the magnitude, we have pictures we can look at to remind us... the Bible is full of them.
God's good, because he has way more than a sunset planned. Just to grace us with more than the combination of 7 billion people's imaginations could dream up. I'm pretty pumped for that, not gonna lie.
~mason