There is a hymn I have been singing since I was a girl. I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses.
I sang it at a funeral thirty years ago. I sang it twelve years ago to put a pair of twins to sleep, over and over in the dark until their breathing changed. I’ve always loved that song and longed for what it describes, the kind of intimacy where a person walks and talks with God like He is standing right there in the wet grass. I wanted it. I did not think I had it.
On Sunday, Pastor Colin preached out of John 14 and explained God is sovereign over suffering, He empathizes with what we’re weeping over, and wants us back in the garden with Him. Getting there is not something we accomplish. It is the work of the Comforter.
It occurred to me then that I have a garden. I’ve had one for almost two years, only there’s sea oats instead of roses.
It is a pier on the York River at first light. It is a marsh in Newport News at the end of the day. Everything in that hymn is true of the water’s edge. I come alone. I come early before anyone else gets there, which I have always seen as wanting the stillness and have never fully understood myself. He speaks and the sound of His voice is birds and water and wind.
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.
That same sermon told the story of the ax head.
It is a small, strange miracle in 2 Kings. The prophets are cutting timber by the Jordan and one of them swings and the iron head flies off the handle into the river, and the man cries out, because the ax was borrowed. Elisha asks where it fell. He throws a stick into the water and the iron floats.
The point Colin made is that it is a ridiculous miracle by every measure of scale. A dropped tool, a borrowed one at that, and God bothered.
“Do not only trust Him with the avalanches,” he said. “Trust Him with the ax heads, too.”
Perhaps because of the avalanche, I notice the ax heads now. I did not used to. I had a life that ran on rails; I was too busy inside it to catch the small provisions. Now I see them everywhere, and I see them mostly at the water.
An ax head is a heron arriving after you have stopped waiting for him. An ax head is clouds when the forecast said rain. It is forty-five seconds of pink after three days of gray.
There is a dialogue out there at dawn and dusk, and I have come to depend on it. I ask God to fill my frame. He fills it with aspects of who He is.
I have been thinking about how differently the light behaves depending on what it has to work with.
When it dances with a good cloud deck, it is radiant and remarkable and all-consuming. On a clear morning, it is electrifying, magnificent, rising with power and might and nothing in front of it. Through rain the light works subtly, softer and sweeter, laying itself down in deep layers inside the clouds. Through haze on a hot day, it turns forgiving and gracious, so gentle you can look directly at the sun and it will not hurt you.
There’s a word for this I explored last week in my blog. Glory. The glory of God is the fullness of His character on display, all of who He is at once. Holiness and might and mercy and judgment and nearness and grace, together, on one landscape.
I cannot hold all of it, not on this side of heaven, so He hands it to me a little at a time, one attribute per morning, one mood per evening, and that is the only reason I can bear to look.
This is why a morning with no sun is not a wasted one. Today, I knew before I got out of bed that I would watch the world light up from the dark without ever seeing the sun itself, and I knew the light would win anyway. It would find the seams in the cloud and make colors and hues and layers out of nothing I could point at. And it did. The clouds cracked open over the pier and the light spilled through, silver and gold, and I wanted to stay out there and keep finding out what God would do.
You do not have to see the sun to receive the light.
Jonathan Edwards wrote a sermon about heaven that I had read before, but as is so often the case, the decades can change our understanding of a familiar text.
He says that God is the highest good, and that fully enjoying Him is infinitely better than the pleasantest arrangements we can make down here. Then he lists what we settle for. Fathers and mothers. Husbands. Wives. Children. The company of earthly friends. All of them, he says, are shadows, and the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; God is the sun. These are but streams; God is the fountain. These are but drops; God is the ocean.
When I read that as a young woman, I thought of people, because that is the list he gives.
This time, I read it and saw the sky.
The two best hours of my day have come to stand in for relationships I no longer have. The sunrise and the sunset have filled a space in my life that used to be filled by a family; I know how that sounds, and it is still true.
When I read Edwards now, I am not thinking about who I lost. I am thinking about the water at first light. And even that, even the best thing I have, even the hour I would not trade for anything on this earth, is a scattered beam. A stream. A drop.
If what I get at six in the morning is a drop, I cannot imagine the ocean.
I have spent my whole life afraid of heaven, of the unknown of it, the dying part, the not knowing what happens or what it is like or whether I will be myself when I get there. I have never longed for it. I have longed for everything else. I set my happiness on family, on a home, on the ache for a baby of my own, on a child who would tether me to this earth and make my enjoyment of this side of heaven better.
That is not how it worked out, and I have had to make peace with a God who did not answer that prayer the way I asked. I cannot be angry with Him for it. It was never promised to me. And it was never about me in the first place. It is about His glory.
Something has changed, though, and I only noticed it in a church service on Sunday. With a year and a half of chasing the light behind me, I have started to want heaven.
I picture it as perpetual alternating sunrises and sunsets, always golden hour or blue hour, never the same sky twice. The quickening that happens in my chest when the sun finally crests the horizon and I feel the warmth land on my face and everything around me changes color at once, and I say thank You out loud because I cannot help it. I think heaven is that, without the part where it ends.
Every glimpse is getting me closer. That is what glimpses are for, I suppose.
Psalm 56 says that God has kept count of my tossings and put my tears in His bottle.
I’ve read that verse as long as I’ve sung the garden hymn, only I finally get it now. I’ve wept at that water’s edge more times this year than I can count, at dawn and after dark. He counted them. He kept them. They are in His book.
Christ does not calm our souls after the trouble is over. He calms them in the midst of it. I would have gotten that wrong a year ago. He prepares a place, He takes us there, and He is there with us; in the meantime, He is gracious enough to give me a place here. That pier is my sanctuary. I did not build it or earn it. It was waiting for me before I knew I needed it.
My friend Nancy, who is old enough to be my mother and takes that liberty, takes great delight in snapping me taking photographs. It’s been fifteen years since my last modeling gig, and I prefer being behind the camera to in front of it these days. Nancy and Susan go everywhere together to shoot, and they keep catching me from behind while I work, and they send me the frames. It is always a gift to see yourself through someone else’s eyes.
Last night at Gloucester Point, at the end of an evening where I shot my first waves and learned to smooth the churn into silk, the two of them handed me a rectangle wrapped in paper. It was a framed photograph Nancy had taken of me that same morning out in the sand photographing an old heron.
She’d added an inscription: Chasing the sun heals the soul.
I didn’t really have words. It was the sweetest, unexpected gift.
These women have caught me standing and prostrate, hunched over or crouched, but this photo is my favorite. I am on my knees, barefoot in the sand, down low, facing the light. I never planned that. I got down there to steady the lens and get the angle I wanted, but that is the posture of my heart, in every single frame I’ve taken, for months.
We finally settled on a name for the herons.
Herald. A bringer of good news. There is one at the pier most mornings and one wherever I end up at night. It doesn’t matter that they’re rarely the same bird. I take them as messengers, ax heads with wings.
Last Thursday at Huntington Beach, I prayed out loud for a heron while a jet ski blasted music and children screamed in the shallows. I thought there was no chance, gave up and started walking back to the car thanking God for the sunset anyway. Then, I heard him call. He flew in and landed on the jetty, and I captured him against the James River Bridge at blue hour.
Ask, and sometimes, right when you have stopped expecting it, He sends a heron.
If He can be trusted with that, He can be trusted with the avalanche.
There is a moment at the end of every school day, walking across the parking lot to my car, when I miss my husband and stepdaughter. Not all day or in the hours I would expect, just that one. For three years, that was the moment I looked forward to, the hinge where the working part of the day ended and real life began.
Now the hinge is sunset. It is raining tonight as I write this, and I can hear it on the roof mixed with traffic instead of the sound of the Coleman Bridge. It is still a bookend. The day closes. Something waits for me on the other side of it.
I should long for Christ the way I have longed for a man. I should ache toward the One who calms me in the middle of the storm the way I ached toward the one who made me feel alive. I am not there yet.
The sunset, on the other hand, was always there. Every one of those evenings I was rushing home, the sky over Hampton Roads was doing something extraordinary. I never looked up. I went to the sunrise every single day before any of this happened and was alone out there with God, and I could not see it because a man was standing in the frame.
I wish it had not taken losing him to make me long for Christ.
The community was always there, too. The photographers, the fishermen, the man who reads my book and runs at sunrise. They were walking past me on that pier the whole time. I only started seeing them when the sun set on my family. God prepared a sanctuary for me, a place this side of heaven. I come to the garden alone, but I am never alone. He walks with me, and He talks with me.
I will go back in the morning, get down on my knees in the sand, and take what I am given. Each crest of the sun is another glimpse at His glory, a shadow of His goodness, a glimmer of what’s in store. I trust Him to handle the ax heads and the avalanches, command the sunrises and the sunsets, and heal my soul so long as I keep chasing the light.
