A Sunset

Yesterday evening (it was Saturday), we were strolling at Clark Lake Park.  We wound through a stand of trees on the gravel path and out onto the flat place where the outline of Mount Rainier was visible through a hazy covering.  We continued down the hill through the cool spot which is hidden from the afternoon sun and then around and up though the part of the trail that is deep in mud most of the year but is easy footing now that we're in the dry season.  We followed the trail as it turned right and then left, and we came to a sudden standstill next to an old, gangly apple tree.  Looking up the hill to the west, a bank of luminous clouds stretched across the panorama, above the horizon of spiky evergreens, and out of the bank shot rays of sunlight, not downward as I have seen after storms in the Plains, but up to the zenith of the sky, up past the backs of our heads.  The rays formed pale blue bands against the clear and deep blue sky, some wider and some narrower, and as we stood and watched for many minutes, the clouds continued to shift shape and glow, and the rays of sunlight changed widths, sometimes joining together and sometimes separating.

I have never seen a sky like this before, I said to Jared.

It looks like pictures you see of the Second Coming, he replied.

This probably isn't it, I remarked.

It will happen when you least expect it, said Jared, ever sagacious.

I thought of a stained glass window, called The Flight of Souls, which forms the centerpiece of the Wade Memorial Chapel in the Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland:

It suddenly struck me that one day I will look up, and unquestionably we will see Jesus coming on the clouds.  What will I feel?  At that moment, I heard my inner voice shout to Jared and Anne, "Look!  It's him!"  I saw myself gathering up my child with awe and joyful anticipation, my heart bursting, wanting to run to the clouds on the horizon, and my feet rooted in place, trying to take in every detail of our glorious moment of salvation.  None of my plans and hopes and dreams are worth hanging onto when there's this weight of eternal splendor before my eyes.  New hopes and dreams arise for the coming Eternity of peace, health, beauty, joy, glory, learning, worship, fullness, and unimaginable heavenly wealth in the presence of a God whose name is Love.  I am a child again and the future is only brightness and possibility.

I cannot shake the beauty of that sky out of my mind.  I tried reducing it to its scientific parts - dust and water droplets, a mixture of gas particles, photons...  The whole is more than the sum of the parts.  Specks of matter cannot explain the beauty.  If we are merely accidental creatures of this accidental earth, how can such beauty move our hearts so much?

Jesus was taken up into a cloud while the disciples were watching, and they could no longer see him.  As they strained to see him rising into heaven, two white-robed men suddenly stood among them.  "Men of Galilee," they said, "why are you standing here staring into heaven?  Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go!"

-Acts 1:9-11