The Sunset
The clock ticks. Frustration mounts. Worry oozes out of the cracks in the face I’ve been trying to keep cool and collected.
I thought things would be working themselves out differently. I thought I had a plan.
Maybe you’re like me, wishing you could see the end of your story. The puzzle pieces are adding up on the table, but they are not coming together to form a coherent picture yet — not in the time frame that you were expecting. Perhaps you have taken a “baby step” forward…but you had been wishing that by this time, you would be sprinting. The rest of the world seems to whirl around you manically and then race far ahead of you, leaving you behind in a hazy daze.
Where on earth are things going? Where is my life headed?
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I have a gut feeling that these questions have been racing through more minds this year than we might think.
Obviously, COVID-19 hit so many of us very hard: physically, if we caught the virus and suffered from its symptoms; financially, if we lost our jobs or had our hours cut; emotionally, if we lost a loved one or haven’t been able to see people; spiritually, if this pandemic has made us question God and our faith.
This year has brought many things to a standstill. It has changed the trajectory of people’s lives and dreams. It has made us question, maybe more so than we had previously, what our lives are meant to be, why we are here, and how each of us are meant to leave a mark in this world.
It has, perhaps, made us examine our lives more deeply. If our lives have been uprooted in some way, and the only way forward is to take a different direction than we had initially planned, maybe we have been forced to look past the surface of our everyday routines and goals and peer into the crevices that we had ignored before.
What are my weaknesses? What have I buried deep down inside of me, but need to bring out and resolve? What must I face in order to move forward with my “new” life?
It can be a hard thing, to examine oneself. When looked at in an honest light, the demons that have made their home inside of us and have gotten comfy are really quite ugly. We discover that the not-so-great habits we’ve been carrying around for some time have grown roots that are far longer than we had thought. We see that in both body and spirit, we may be filthier than what we allowed ourselves to think before.
The unfulfilled plans and dreams, as well as the reality of our sinful state, can lead us to feel destitute and hopeless. What is there to look forward to? What is there that can bring true joy and peace?
And then, we see the sunset, a beautiful sight to the eyes: warm, sweet colors blending together in a beautiful display as the bright sun moves closer and closer to the horizon.
How could any human create such a masterpiece? We can recreate it with a variety of mediums, sure, and many artists have done so successfully. But could any of us have thought up the original idea of a sunset in the first place, before any such phenomenon came to be?
God, in his infinite artistry, gave this scene to us for reasons that are most likely not fully understood by us. However, that doesn’t stop us from relishing it, drinking it in, letting it soothe our anxious and weary souls.
As we take inventory of our lives thus far, make new plans, and get ready to embark on a future we can’t fully see and understand yet, let us remember that our Father in heaven has the pictures of each of our lives worked out. He knows where we’re going in this life. He knew us before we knew ourselves, before we were even created inside our mothers’ wombs. Such an almighty, omniscient, eternal God can handle the details.
The clock ticks…and I fear. I worry. I have found myself in that situation far more often than I would like to admit.
But whenever fear and worry creeps up on us, we have the freedom, through faith in Jesus’ redemptive work for us, to chase the anxious clouds away with the light of God’s Word:
“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10)
The Lord of the heavens and the earth has planned out our stories — just as he created the majestic sunset in the sky.
“‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me.’” (John 14:1)
