Upon a Stormy Night

The night moves in a cold wind. Its icy fingers splash small raindrops on my face. The rushing air and the convulsing trees and the flying drops pierce me, moving my inmost parts, perhaps my soul. And I want to run into the wind and rain until the wind can no longer blow and the rain falls in hot, sweaty drops from my forehead. I want to catch the night at its beginning and commune with it before it no longer cares. I want the entire storm to course through me before it disperses over the rest of the world.

God knew the world at its inception, and knew me before mine. And he knew that last night I would pace around my house in aimless anticipation, my entire being longing for something more, something outside, endless, intense, complete. Something, perhaps, that I shall only find when I have seen my last stormy night. Praise God, for He uses His creation to awaken His creature.

Galatians 3 - 4:7

First, by grace, you made us sons.

Then, by grace, you gave us the spirit of true sonship.

Finally, since we are now your sons, by grace you entitled us to a magnificent inheritance.

God, thank you for your grace and love.

When God Paints...

Two seats to my left in the back of a UCLA lecture hall, a girl in a tight pink shirt and a trucker hat mixed herself a drink in a styrofoam cup. She slouched into a position that was as near horizontal as possible and began fumbling with her cell phone, which she dropped, emitting a string of good-natured explitives to showcase her humorous outlook on the cell-phone-dropping situation. The professor droned through his canned, juvenial jokes, covering in an hour and a half what I could have read in 20 minutes, given a decent textbook. As he began to exceed the portion of my life allotted to him by the university I began to pack my bag and prepare for my release. If it was dark outside I would cry - who came up with this time change thing?

Shuffling to the door amidst the crowd of my fellow biz econ majors (whom, for the most part, I don't much respect), I made sure to avoid eye contact with that kid from my childhood that I don't feel like recognizing. His world is not my world, he would never understand.

Leaving the building, my eyes roving, hungry for something substantial, worthy, I saw with a touch of shame that God had been busy. The sky burned a bonfire orange on a dark beach, the softly undulating clouds glorified like the Son of Man in the evening sky. Faces darkened around me, became meaningless and dull, like economics in February. I walked and stared, long strides to show my transcendence. I planned my route specificially to maximize sunset viewing time, and rounded the final corner in time to be shocked by a burst of red slowly slipping behind the apartments. God had been painting. His pallette covered with colors that he invented, unduplicatable, like radiant-sun orange, and refractory pink. And he saw that his airy canvas was done, and was good, and displayed it before our weary eyes and unappreciative appetites.

I was ready for it, gracedly, and realized when I got home and was no longer disgusted by the trucker hat girl, no longer embittered by the slow pace of the class, that when God paints, it behooves us to watch.