I awoke early to a sky still full of stars and a moon so bright and full I would swear it was a street light. The rustling sounds of nylon indicate either a willingness to greet the impending dawn or a certain disdain for the cold Californian darkness. I am underdressed for the cold but I get up anyway. Down the the hill I find coffee and companions ready to join me in a quest for still water. We steal glimpses of the stars before the are lost and anticipate the sun.
I have come here for two years now to camp with a church group from Southern California. We drive north for hours to spend a week by the lake sharing in fellowship, worship and water skiing. There are no cabins here, no tents, only stars to cover our heads at night. I learned to wakeboard here the year before and this year am determined to ride without the shaky need for balance. The water is like glass this early in the day and behind the boat I am alone with morning. This is what cowboys must feel like.
If God is not in the morning he is not in anything I am convinced. There are days where watching the world reveal is to see it for the first time. I have never seen a sunrise and dreaded the day ahead of me, no matter what lie ahead. Since these mornings in California I have been able to greet the new day with frequency; in the mountains, on airplanes, in my own home. I have come to love the time of day I often cursed and during these moments of solitude I have done a lot of thinking.
To see something new is to see it with wonder. Rarely, if ever, do I find terror in the experience of the unknown, merely in the thought of it. To be alive, after all, is to constantly discover if your senses are open. I forget this often but never in the morning. Every sip of coffee, every word read, every song heard is vibrant and alive; time passes slowly with patience and no resentment.
How appropriate then God would consider spiritual experience to be a rebirth, that we are to be born again. How fitting the scriptures say that God “is making all things new!” I amazed to think that Christ left the tomb while most of the world slept, a time in which only those who sought him would find him. We were never intended to toil in the brutal sun and its scorching heat or under the heavy veil of constant darkness. In these moments it is as if the sun were to always be rising, to constantly revive the earth and expel darkness, making all things new.
It is for this reason we must live in the morning. I am growing in the conviction the day should not be slept away but that we should wake up with the world. John Lennon was right, living is easy with eyes closed, but all we miss in the dawn is symbolic of a better way to live. We are children of the dawn.
