These days, I plan my evenings around a radar map.
Most shorelines on this side of the peninsula sit within a half hour of my door, so I let the sky decide where I go. I refresh the forecast the way others check a stock ticker, waiting to see what the clouds intend. Monday, it promised gray, everywhere, all day. I kept refreshing anyway. And then late in the afternoon, it changed its mind and offered me a single region-wide gift: partly cloudy, from the rivers to the bay.
I knew exactly where I was going.
Lions Bridge sits at the end of the Mariners’ Museum Park, where four stone lions keep watch over the water. I got there with time to spare, and then the sky did something I have never seen it do. It caught fire behind those lions and it would not stop. Orange, then rose, then a pink I have been trying and failing to name ever since. Egrets came. Herons came. My new lens finally reached far enough to show me the individual feathers of an egret’s wing as it crossed in front of the sky, and I stood there by the bridge and let it happen to me.
Then, as if He were not finished showing off, the sunset followed me the whole drive home. It filled my mirrors and reflected in the sky ahead, refusing to be over.
I have been thinking all day about why that sky undid me, and I think I finally have it.
For a long time, the sun rose and set in my husband.
I don’t say it lightly or poetically. I say it because it is the truest confession I have. My whole world revolved around a man. I organized my days around his moods, my hopes around his promises, my peace around whether he was going to still be there. I woke up and checked the weather of him. I built my life on the forecast of one person, and I called that love.
What I understand now, standing on a bridge with a camera in my hands, is this: I never knew if he was going to be stormy or calm or partly cloudy.
That is not what you want in a partner. That is what you want in the sky.
The unpredictability that terrified me in a man is the very thing that undoes me in a sunset. The sky is never the same twice, and I have come to treasure that. Fire one night, a soft gray hush the next, a stubborn seam of gold that throws itself across the water when the forecast swore there was nothing coming. The sky shows me a different facet of God every single evening… His majesty, His grandeur, His fierceness, His tenderness, fire and light and peace all sharing the same horizon. It is variety, and underneath every version of it, He is faithful. That is the difference. The sky changes; the One who paints it does not.
The missing piece is the light. An idol changes and you never know what you’re going to get. God changes His colors and He is the same God. Whatever the mood, the light is in it.
The idol came off the throne in February. Not by my hand. By his own.
And in the wreckage of that, with nowhere else to put myself before dawn, I kept driving to the water. I have gone every morning since. I came looking for something to hold onto, and I found the God who had been standing there the entire time I had my back turned, painting the sky for an audience of one whose eyes were fixed on the man in the foreground instead.
On Sunday, my pastor preached on the man born blind.
You know the story. The disciples see him and immediately want a reason. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” They need the suffering to be deserved. Because if it’s deserved, it’s legible, and if it’s legible, it can’t come for them.
And Jesus tells them they are asking the wrong question entirely.
Pastor Colin put it in a sentence I thanked him for after service: “Suffering is not a stage for God’s punishment or His wrath. It is a stage for His grace and His glory.”
I have felt the weight of that old question. There are people who look at what happened to me and go hunting for the cause the way the disciples did… she married too fast, she married the wrong man, she should have known. They want the arithmetic to work out. I understand the impulse. It is a very human thing to want suffering to make sense.
But I am telling you from inside of it: that is not what this has been.
This has been a stage. And the grace and glory keep showing up on it.
Not long ago, I wasn’t sure I would ever feel free enough, or steady enough, to stand still inside a moment that beautiful and simply take it in. That is not a small thing. For most of the last year I was too braced, too tired, too busy surviving to receive anything. Beauty came and I flinched at it or documented it or let it slide past me because I had no room.
Last night, on that river, with the whole sky on fire and the egrets crossing through it, I stood still. I didn’t brace. I didn’t flinch. I let God give it to me.
I realized something standing there that I would not have believed a year ago, and that I am almost afraid to write down.
I would not trade this suffering for the life I thought I wanted.
I would not go back and unmake it in exchange for the family I dreamed of, the one I would have traded anything to keep. Because when the idol was finally dragged off the throne, God took His rightful place on it, and I have spent five months finding out who He actually is at the water’s edge at dawn. I would not give that back. Not for anything.
I have forgiven the man. I want to be clear about that… because forgiveness is not the same thing as pretending, and I have done the first and refuse to do the second. I trust God with the justice, whatever it turns out to look like, in His timing and not mine. That is His to carry, and I have finally set it down.
They call it the Lions Bridge for the stone lions who stand watch at either end, but the Lion I met on Monday was not made of stone.
Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered.
He roared across a sky on fire, and I heard Him in every streak of cloud and light. He kept roaring the whole way home, filling my mirrors, refusing to be finished. The suffering could not touch me inside that heavenly embrace.
The sun rises and sets as He commands. It always did, even when my eyes were too focused on the familiar silhouette in the foreground to see. God’s glory and grace are waiting at the horizon in the light at the start and end of each day. Keep your gaze fixed on the sun, and suffering slips into the shadows.
If you love this kind of thing, I chase these skies every day over at Chasing the Sun: Hampton Roads. Come find the light with me.
Writer's Growth 