Wednesday of the Third Week of Advent

Remember your word to your servant,
  because you have given me hope.  Psalm 119:49-50

I drive through the late afternoon grayness, the lights of traffic and scattered houses painting the streets with bright splashes of color turned liquid by the rain. The translucent mauve sky flattens the treed horizon, and I feel like I am driving inside the wet rather than through it.

The sky darkens from taupe to brown to blue-black as the bare branched trees trace intricate patterns against the fading light, and I am enveloped by the woods, and water, and wonder. What beauty, God’s creation. What endless possibility of color and light and liquid.

As I wend my way through the twists and turns in gathering darkness and damp, I think of the hope that carries me through the flat places, where God’s beauty and possibility do not breakthrough to my heart.

But the gift is more. Not only can I hold on to this hope when my way seems bereft. I have been handed the possibility, no the certainty, that I might discover God in the leaden times that dull my senses. 

I pray to see God in the awkward moments and in the dull moments and in the flat times ahead as I drive on into the night and the expectation of illumination.




Image credit: andreiuc88 / 123RF Stock Photo 
Copyright Anne E. Kitch 2014