Waiting on the Sunrise

This morning I awoke before dawn with the Spirit insisting I get up and pray.  Daily I awake this early and I am normally content to cuddle deeper into the warm covers and say my prayers with my head still on my pillow in that beautiful space in between worlds.  Letting the prayers that began in my state of sleep continue as I begin to wake.  Words of the Spirit, placed on my heart, brought into the light of my conscience. 

This morning I was called to rise.  I found my favorite chair in my hubby’s office and I turned to stare out the windows and began praying and awaiting the sunrise.  There is something so sacred and holy about these moments before sunrise.  Imagining the long night of deep darkness, the unknowing, the inability to see, your hearing heightened trying to make sense of the deep silence and the slightest of noises and then suddenly there is a tiny shimmer of light on the horizon, so tiny you think you imagined it. 

 ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”  John 16:12

As I sit staring into the darkness, honing in on the glimmer of light I wonder what God might want to share with me in the dark, in the stillness, in the silence.  What can I not bear to know?  What truths are stretched just beyond my reach?  What knowledge is sitting at the foot of the light waiting to be revealed?  During the long night I have been given respite and rest, a chance to build my courage to hear God.  Sunrise brings awakening, shining forth those many things waiting to be known and beckons us step into the light.  To act, to speak, witnessing daily miracles in those moments of gratitude and grace, to share our story, to share our place in God’s story.

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”  C. S. Lewis

So I close my eyes and continue my prayers and then quick open them again to see.  And behold it was not my imagination, the tiny shimmer is still there and then it begins to grow.  There is warmth and a knowing.  A new day is beginning.  The light is shining forth bringing hope and peace, new knowledge and new work.

I love this time of day, this peace and contentment.  I did absolutely nothing to invoke this miracle.  I sat in the darkness, I prayed and I waited.  And the gift of a new day is brought to me.  I open my hands and I lift my arms and my heart proclaims, “Thank You!”