GOD’S GIFT OF MORNING

When we lived in Maine I often looked out over the autumn-colored country fields; in Tucson I stood by my kitchen window and often mused “I look unto the hills from whence cometh my help,” (Psalm 121:1 KJV) while not so long ago on a West Texas morning I opened our office window blinds and studied the gray-blue sky to the east to see it tinged with brightening shades of lighter blue peeking through massive rose-colored ever-changing clouds scrolling across the horizon. As I stared into God’s gift of morning I contemplated the comparisons of the beauties of my life’s personal fields, hills, and ever-changing skies.
fields of color:
When I was a toddler I tended to see everything as a field ablaze with brilliant colors, something to be examined by touch, taste, smell, sat in, bounced on, walked on, looked at from a distance then with an up-close and in-person point of view! I saw beauty every way I turned and in every thing I saw. Life was exciting and nothing marred its beauty. Everything seemed to be perfect and there just for me.
hills of help:
Of course it didn’t take many youthful experiences of touching, tasting, smelling, etc., before I found myself in trouble that taught me everything was not totally perfect and that I needed to look up for help to someone bigger than I, usually my mother who was the one close by! There was that day that I climbed the shelves of a floor-to-ceiling of a side-by-side wooden cabinet in an attached shed with the intent of reaching the top to get that brown packet up there. I was sure it was a filled inner lining of a Kool-Aid® packet. (During those years they were double-packaged: decorative outside much like today but a brown paper-lining packet inside.) I loved anything that was sweet and I aimed to get it. I got it. I am not sure how my mother found out but before I got much more than a bitter taste and a bad stain in and around my mouth, I quickly learned the packet I had worked so hard to get was clothing dye! It’s a good thing my mother was on the alert and appeared in time to help but it’s also no wonder her hair turned white at an early age. My mother was a little lady but she was also a mountain of help that many looked up to with expectation of answers for many questions, myself included.
skies changing:
Life changes like the colors in the skies. Sometimes we love looking at the colors in our life changes; sometimes we dread the storm-clouds we see at a distance or up close. During my youth I clung to my mother and developed an unreasonable fear of her death I suppose because she had many ailments. The shock came when I was twenty-seven when my mother called with the news that at not quite fifty-seven, “Daddy’s gone.” A massive heart attack with no obvious warning had taken my daddy. My youthful fears about my mother’s untimely death were unfounded…she lived to be nearly ninety-two years of age. That was a good lesson to me that we should not worry about the troubles of tomorrow (Matthew 7:34). Daddy’s early death was a release from his worldly cares and concerns. He didn’t have to live on in an impaired body which could have been the alternative and he was ready to meet his Father. The years of my mother’s widowhood gave our family time to learn more about the needs of the aging, things we couldn’t learn from books no matter how hard we tried. Whether we find youthful anticipation or aging affliction in life’s changing skies we can learn to choose to rejoice in God’s Gift of Morning.
morning:
Morning…generally thought of as the start of a new day. There is a very special start of a new day coming: ”But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” Jesus ~ Matthew 24:36 (NASB)
On That Morning the gifts from each of these past mornings - fields of color, hills of help, the changing skies – will have done their jobs and be in the past - and at that moment we will truly understand The Gift of Morning.© Marilyn Sue Moore September 15, 2008