looking up

There's this spot I always pass as I drive into Silverdale where I can see practically forever. The city looks much smaller than it actually is, and the trees give it a peaceful, serene quality. (Much more peaceful, say, than it feels on the main drag at 5 as everyone's getting off work. They're all hurrying, honking horns & noticing in the rear-view how tired and run-down they look). Looking straight ahead, past Silverdale and its self-important busyness, are acres and acres of quiet woods. They often resemble someone's painting - evergreen, then a bluish, and then fading into a hazy gray off in the distance before your eyes stray to the beauty of the rugged Olympic peaks.





If I look to my left, I have an incredible view of Dyes Inlet -- home to herons, bald eagles, gulls, and orcas -- and onetime refuge for me as a lonelier, younger version of myself. I grew up not far from there, and I'd often run down the path to where it met the water's edge for time to think. I would just sit there, my arms pulling my knees up tight into my chest to brace against the chill breeze. Just sitting. No one watching. No one expecting anything. No one to impress or disappoint. Just time to talk to God and listen to the water lapping up on the rocky shore. The only thing present to break the peace was a fish jumping or a bird singing. Welcome interruptions.





Tonight, a traffic light stopped me right in this very spot. And held me there. Normally, I'm annoyed to be the first one stopped, as it means that I wait the longest. Especially this week. I've been hurried, stressed, and troubled. So tangled up in my own knots that I've been unpresent to the moments and people around me. Not so tonight. I let myself look. I let myself stare for once at the beauty all around me, and I drank it up. The sun was just starting to go down, but the clouds were all shining gold. Rays shone down through the clouds, the kind that always make me feel that God's about to say something important, that some kind of big announcement is coming.





And as I just let myself be, God did say something important. (I've never heard God speak in the audible sense of it, but there are many ways to hear, and it may be that the heart hears best of all, in my experience). Take the time to look up, Stacey. I'm still here. In the midst of your circumstances, in the midst of your troubles, I am here. If you see only the busyness, the day-to-day, the mundane, the silent screaming of the world around you, of course your heart will be laid low. So look up! Look for Me... look for My perspective, and you will find hope. I am working in ways that you don't see, and often putting things together in ways you don't understand. But I am here, and I love you. Look up!





Corinthians 4.16-18 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.