my dear friend,
Do you think about stars? Do you walk outside when the soft darkness spreads over the sky to look up?
I don't as often as I used to. In my teenage years I spent hours looking up at the darkened sky. I would slip out from the warm lamplight of my bedroom into the cool starlight spread on the scratchy garage roof to lay and look. Little blooms of light tucked themselves into the velvet sky, sometimes dimmed by Miss Moon who tossed silver tulle across the clouds and dark ground.
Stars seemed so still—immobile lives of brightness.
Yet light is motion.
Light travels years and years to touch our eyes, a patchwork of particles journeying like a band of gypsies. When we look at the night sky, we look at a picture of the past that only arrives to us in the present. I am a time traveler, wandering back to a star that just now might be different—or has disappeared.
Lying on the summer-sun-warmed roof, I felt small and yet seen. My eyes adjusted to the dark as I watched, and I saw more and more stars. The more I saw, the smaller I felt. The smaller I felt, the more deeply I understood the beauty of being seen. The Maker knows the far-away stars, ancient and vast. The same Good Shepherd knows his own, writes the apostle John. He knows me.
He didn't make stars just for me or you. He made them because he makes beautiful things, and he cannot do otherwise—it is who God is. And yet, he made them knowing we might love them, and in turn, love him.
Maybe we can all look at the stars more?
Sit on the roof or in the yard to see the past just reaching us with the messages of glory. Or catch a glimpse on the way inside—lingering one long moment to let the stars sing their songs to us.
Come look with me? What beauty we might see.
with joy,
karly alexandra