For some reason, the last several days I’ve been waking up at 5 in the morning, which is about an hour and a half earlier than I need to. I’ve been taking advantage of this extra time, and a couple of mornings I’ve driven far out into the country to watch the sunrise. Many people like to watch the sunset. I like sunrises. There is tremendous potential, promise, and hope in a sunrise.
This morning it was looking as if I’d get to see a spectacular one – as the night sky started to wane into purples and blues, I could see the faint outline of wispy clouds. Oftentimes this means that before too long, they’ll be lit up with breathtaking hues of orange and pink, exploding the sky into wisps of fire and light.
I found a nice peaceful spot to park my truck along a gravel road, and climbed into the back, taking a front-row seat to watch the beauty unfold before me. The sky got brighter and clearer, but before long I realized that things wouldn’t turn out quite like I’d hoped. The clouds were too low to the ground, and would be blocking my view of the sunrise, not enhancing it.
I was going to leave, but felt I should stay. It was a very peaceful, crisp, calm fall morning. In the distance I could hear ducks quacking, roosters crowing, and cattle lowing at a farm down the road. Deer meandered across the freshly-harvested corn fields in front of me. And I watched.
As I sat there on the rails of my truck bed, in between the clouds I could see glimpses of a truly spectacular sunrise. Which got me to thinking.
Many times in life we don’t understand what’s going on, or why things happen they way they do. We wonder what God is doing because we can’t see Him at work. Just like those clouds hid the sunrise from my view, so too the clouds in our lives sometimes hide the hand of God from us.
The key thing is that even though we can’t see Him at work, He is still active in our lives.
Charles Spurgeon once said, “We must trust God’s heart even when we cannot trace His hand.” Oswald Chambers commented, “Yet it is through these very clouds that the Spirit of God is teaching us how to walk by faith. If there were never any clouds in our lives, we would have no faith. “The clouds are the dust of His feet” (Nahum 1:3). They are a sign that God is there.”
God has promised that He will never leave us, and that nothing can separate us from His love. Even though we can’t always see Him at work in our lives and circumstances, we can trust that He is, and that the plans He has for our lives are good and wonderful ones to make us more like His Son. And at some points along the way, we’re able to look back and catch a glimpse of what He has been doing, and it truly takes our breath away.