First, a personal note. Today is the 44th anniversary of our first date. Happy anniversary, Babe.
Now, the post.
I have a clear memory of an event from when I was just 3 or 4 years old.
My father and I were going someplace in the car—I believe that would have been the yellow 1954 Nash Rambler. I was standing up on the floor behind the front seat. (We weren’t much on child restraint—or anybody restraint—in those days.) It was nighttime, and I got interested in the oncoming headlights. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, but every so often another pair would appear on the horizon. I got to saying, “Here come annuddah one” when that happened.
Dad joined in the game, responding with, “That’s all, Dan, no more.” Of course, that just increased my excitement when the next one appeared. Before long I was jumping up and down and screaming, “HERE COME ANNUDDAH ONE!!!” and laughing hysterically. Dad was laughing enthusiastically too.
I didn’t really understand his joy until I became a Dad myself.
And nearly 70 years later, I remember hanging onto the back of the front seat, and seeing the oncoming headlights, and jumping up and down, and screaming, and hearing my Dad laugh with unmitigated enjoyment.
Dad remembered it too, until the day he died after six years of dementia. We often spoke of it.
Another thought, seemingly unrelated. Bear with me.
My wife and I like to go to Hilton Head Island once a year, sometimes more. I like the fact that now that I’m retired, we can go during the school year, the “off season,” and get lower rates.
When we’re there, one of my favorite activities is to get up an hour or so before sunrise and walk east on the beach for a couple of miles, timing it so I arrive at a certain favorite spot just as the sun peeks the top of his shiny bald head up over the horizon. Typically the beach is empty when I start the walk, but by sunrise there are a dozen or so people at the spot, some doing yoga poses as they face the sun, others reading their Bibles, others just walking around picking up shells.
World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle once wrote, “Dawn is the most perfect part of the day—if you’ve got the nerve to get up and see it” (“Roving Reporter,” The Pittsburgh Press, 7/7/43).
Some people worship the sun; maybe some of the people out on the beach with me fall into that category. But whatever the specifics, we all seem to have this visceral response to the sunrise. It seems meaningful to us, in some way.
Long, long ago the Creator of heaven and earth made a promise. After a global flood of judgment, he said that no such flood would happen again. And then he said,
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease (Ge 8.22).
Every morning, he said, the sun will rise.
I think that our attraction to sunrise is based in the fact that we, in the image of God, rejoice that he keeps his promises—that he is faithful. Even those who don’t know him respond to that image at the very core of their being.
We were at Hilton Head again this past week. And do you know what I thought each morning as I saw the southeastern sky slowly lighten, and the color display adorn the horizon?
“HERE COME ANUDDAH ONE!”
I didn’t jump up and down and shout and laugh hysterically, because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my time at Hilton Head in a padded room.
But the joy was just as intense—even more so, because this light on the horizon is infinitely more meaningful than those oncoming headlights all those decades ago.
And you know what? That sunrise is always there. It’s not transitory. It’s a permanent halo around the earth, which is rotating underneath it at a thousand miles an hour (at the equator). And thus we see it every morning, and again from the other side every evening.
Before they died, my wife’s parents had a small plaque hanging in their hall bathroom. It featured a nature scene and the words “Ever watchful / ever faithful / everlasting is the Lord.”
Indeed.
Photo by Jason Pischke on Unsplash