There is a soundtrack to the York River before dawn.

Water against the pilings. A gull, sometimes, complaining at no one. And the Coleman Bridge transporting the first cars of the day across the water. I know some people would call that noise, an intrusion on the quiet. I have come to love it. The bridge hums a little louder every minute from five to seven, the sound of the world waking up while I stand at the pier with my camera, already there. I like being up before the buzz, hearing it swell, knowing the day is starting and I’ve got a head start on the light.

Because the light is, after all, why I come.

For all thirty mornings of June, I went out to the same stretch of river to watch the sun arrive. Same pier. Same water. Not once — not a single one of those thirty mornings — did the sky repeat itself. Some dawns came up in fire, the whole eastern sky catching like something struck a match to it. Some came up in pink so soft you could have missed it. Other days the forecast promised gray and the sky disagreed, the light finding a seam in the clouds and pouring through anyway. The grace, I’ve noticed, doesn’t clear the clouds; it breaks through them.

There’s a passage I kept thinking about out there at the river’s edge, morning after morning. It’s from Lamentations when Jeremiah is writing from the middle of grief, from a city in ruins, of all places to find this: “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

New every morning. Jeremiah didn’t write that on a good day. No, he was writing in the wreckage, and still he called the mercy new every morning. Thirty dawns at one pier taught me he meant it literally. The compassion really does show up new, every single time, whether you’re there to see it or not. Being fully present in these moments, solitary at the sunrise, I’m never more aware of God’s presence.

He works in mysterious and marvelous ways, to be sure.

I started this June needing the light. I came to the water because I was looking for something I couldn’t find anywhere else, and the sunrise was the most reliable place to find it. Still, somewhere in those thirty mornings, the needing quietly became something else. I stopped coming to the river to be rescued by the light and started coming to go looking for it — camera in hand, before the alarm most people set, certain the river would have something to show me.

The river holds mercies at dawn and at dusk, as I’ve recently discovered. It’s exciting to chase the sunset across Hampton Roads, but my favorite place to capture the show is still from the Yorktown Riverfront. Starting and ending the day with the sun. The light didn’t just lift me; it gave me back to myself. The woman who shows up before first and last light, who delights in a bridge waking up and the beach going quiet, who believes joy and beauty are worth getting out of bed for? She’d been gone a while. The York River handed her back.

I knew it for sure the night I saw Zoey.

I was on the far shore, photographing the sun going down over the water, when a girl I used to know walked by… a child I’d loved through omelets after sleepovers, from a chapter of my life that has since turned its page. A month ago, I’d have braced myself, maybe looked away and become small. I couldn’t brace, though. I was in my element, full of light and the river and the unique gladness of doing the thing I love, feeling hopeful with a camera in my hand ready to capture the wonder around me. So, before I could think to guard myself, a smile spread across my face, and the words spilled out warm and easy: “Hi Zoey! It’s so good to see you.”

She smiled back. A little in spite of herself, maybe, but she smiled, and waved, and it wasn’t anything like what I’d have predicted. It was just two people who’d been glad to know each other, glad again for a second on a beach at sunset to be reminded of good memories.

It wasn’t what I thought it would be. So much of this season hasn’t been.

That, I think, is what thirty sunrises can do to a person. It doesn’t fix everything, but I have to believe that you need to keep showing up to the light until you’ve become someone who carries a little of it with you.

The last sunrise of June saved something special to bid the month farewell. A deer wandered the shoreline in the pink before dawn, and a heron took the rocks as the sun broke gold — both of them witnesses to God’s glory, the same as me. I started this June needing the light. I’m ending it having learned to go looking for it… every single morning, cloud or fire or flat gray sky.

Thank you, June, for thirty reasons to get up.

And thank You, Lord, for steadfast love that never ceases, for mercies new every morning, and for never once painting the same sky twice.