Musings on a Gray Morning

My morning visit to the porch took me into a morning overcast with low thick gray clouds.  To add to the aura of the morning, there was just enough fog to bring the gray down to earth.  It was a gray morning empty of any markers which might point one toward north or south or east or west.  The morning provided a vision of what I was seeing and what I felt as I looked not toward the unseen horizon, but inward toward a feeling that somehow I had lost sight of my true north.  The events of the recent days had flooded over me in such a way that my moorings seem to have been washed away from underneath the foundation of my being.  

Such was the awareness which weighed heavily upon me as I stood there wanting to offer praise for a new day and gratitude for blessings that had come and which were surely coming.  Not being able to find either within me, I simply stood to become a part of the morning that had come to break the darkness which had covered the farm viewed from the porch.  In the midst of this moment of feeling separated from where I was and from whom I knew myself to be, a Word from the Psalmist came to break the inner darkness as surely as the morning sun soon took away the grayness of the morning.  From the 121st Psalm the Words started playing in my spirit.  "I lift up my eyes to the hills--from whence will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth." (Psalm 121:1-2). 

Suddenly, as a lost soul in the wilderness might catch a ray of morning sunshine from the eastern sky, I saw again my way. I saw not the east, but my true north.  As the prophet Isaiah wrote, "I saw the Lord..." (Isaiah 6:1), not high and lifted up, but in the gray all around me and within me.  It was not a moment which took away completely the shadow of the sadness, but it was a moment which pointed me toward the One who has always guided me through all kinds of shadows to the Light I have come to know as everlasting, inextinguishable, and eternal.