Waking the Dawn
In a fitting coincidence, the weather yesterday exactly mirrored the weather we had a year ago yesterday. It was beautiful and sunny in the morning, and an onslaught of rain steadily pattered and poured outside my open window as I studied for the bar last night — just like June 16, 2007, a day that I still remember very well.
It was a sunny Saturday morning. I had an eggs benedict brunch at Pastis, followed by random wandering through a handful of art galleries in Chelsea. I’d never been to any little art galleries in that area before, and I remember marveling at how much real estate must cost. I couldn’t believe how much artists and gallery owners were shelling out to house a few small pieces in such vast and open spaces! I repeated my bemusement aloud in various permutations over the next couple hours.
I remember one particular artistic installment invited visitors to reform a wooden sculpture by moving planks; in that way, we viewers could actually participate in the sculpture’s evolution. He was hesitant, but I insisted, and we had a lot of fun recreating the artform. From noon to three, we bounced in and out of galleries, hand in hand, arm in arm, and all was well in the world.
After that, we watched another episode of “Prison Break,” and I jumped and yelped a bit at all the appropriate parts, to his amusement. He nestled his head in the crook of my arm and great peace settled around us. But it was short-lived. We moved from where we wanted to be, and especially where I wanted to be, and we took a one-way trip to the zoo, with him holding my hand but nevertheless leading the way. He took me there to pay a visit to the big elephant in the room.
And as we visited it, and talked about it — almost as if scripted in a movie, clouds moved past the sun and descended lower and lower until your room became so dark that his face was shielded with a shadow. It was depressing, but fitting, for as the next hour passed, our dialogue soon reduced to apologies and an almost audible silence, and sorrowful tension filled the space that had known peaceful contentment just hours before.
Outside, rain poured down. I don’t remember hearing thunder or lightning; I just remember lots and lots of rain — a multitude of super-sized drops falling from the heavens to steadily soak the ground, splash furiously on the sidewalk, and collect in pools along the curb. And deep down somewhere, in a silly and self-centered sort of way, I almost felt like the rain fell for me, as if the skies were already sympathizing with me and preluding the many tears I’d cry in the weeks that would follow.
I cried all night on the phone with friends and on the phone with my parents, and the next morning, I got up and went to the early church service…then I boarded a plane from Newark and headed to the West Coast for less than 24 hours on business (from there I would go to Nashville via Atlanta on another business trip that would last less than 24 hours, and head to DC for litigation training just three days later).
Since I was scheduled to be in LA for such a narrow window of time, I know that my time there was nothing less than a well-orchestrated act of providence — God actually arranged for my business trip to coincide perfectly with a wedding that had brought three of my closest brothers to the West Coast as well. So when I got into LAX, we all ate dinner together… and the blanket of love with which they surrounded me was to me a direct and clear expression of God’s love. It served as a powerful reminder that He was still with me. I journaled that night, “My friend KE used to tell me that if God wants you in Egypt, He will send twelve angry brothers after you to put you there, if necessary. Well I see that God wanted to comfort me, and He has sent me–and my three brothers–2400+ miles away to do it.”
That was the beginning of a long and eventful journey to where I am today.
* * *
Last night there was a storm outside — just as there was a storm last year around this time — but this morning brought a gloriously new and beautiful day. Leftover droplets glistened in the bright sunshine, bringing a sparkle to the landscape that would have been missing if it weren’t for the rain. The same is true for our lives, I think.
As I walked to the gym, Nichole Nordeman’s “Mercies New” flowed from my ipod and into my ears, and into my heart -
Lord, Your mercies are new every morning
So let me wake with the dawn
When the music is through or so it seems to be
Let me sing a new song, old things gone
I still carry the past, especially this particular part (which is why I speak of it so often) and a few select others, heavily within me even now. But as I pause to look back on the road I’ve been on, it is easy to see that God’s mercies have accompanied me every step of the way. There were so many dark moments in the last year, but at the same time, in absolutely every day I have had things to be thankful for (and I have a daily journal recording such things, to prove it). God’s mercies truly have been new, literally every morning.
The same is also true at a macro level. It’s a year later now, and I now have the benefit of seeing that part of my past in greater perspective. Distance is a funny thing; we so often think of proximity as being proportionally related to familiarity and understanding, but that’s not always the case. For instance, when we hold up a magazine to our noses, it’s so close that we only see a blur. It’s only when we allow some distance to intervene that we can read clearly and see things for what they are.
Much in the same way, an entire trip around the sun has occurred since that sunny-to-stormy day last June. Today I reflect on events from a year and a day ago, and I see that all of it was inevitable. At the time, I wanted the laws of the physics that govern life to be bound by the law of inertia. Admittedly, it’s hard to say now whether, if given the choice, I would actually go back and freeze my life — our lives — in that moment and keep it there forever. Sometimes I think I would; but increasingly, I am learning to trust that God intended the outcome, and in His hands I must rest my then-regret.
In all honesty, I think I’m still quite a ways away from regaining the same innocent and hopeful trust that I used to enjoy before last June, but I can attest that the stormy night is — I think — coming to a close. Or at least it’s morphing in such a way that I can begin to see the light again.
After an emotional rollercoaster of a year, things are finally settling down for me, so much so that in recent days, I have been experiencing a deeper and abiding contentment, and a stillness in my spirit, that has eluded me for longer than I care to acknowledge.
God did not promise that our lives in Him would be easy or anywhere near perfect, but instead He promised something greater… so all praise be to a God who promises to hold our hand through every dark valley, and who pledges to walk alongside our every trouble, and who vows to faithfully surround us forever with the greatest love and compassion we will ever know in this life. And all thanks be to a God who conquers our sin and reserves an eternal inheritance for us in the next.
Lord, your mercies are new every morning, so let me wake the dawn…