When You Find Yourself Gazing Out Windows

From twelve stories up, we stood in the enclosed balcony gazing down on the ocean.

As the time neared 8 p.m. in the southern hemisphere, we watched the fiery disk slide further into the horizon.

"I always said if I ever lived by the ocean, I would watch the sun set every night," I said to my son, my words hushed near day's completion.

"Count," my grandson instructed. We began at twenty, three generations with eyes westward.

"20. 19. 18. 17 ...."

The sun slipped lower.

"5. 4. 3. 2. 1."

The sun disappeared without fanfare as if swallowed by the waves, unlike Arizona sunsets that linger and burnish the sky with a multitude of colors and hues: peach, violet, bronze, scarlet. The Chilean sunset spent all its currency for the privilege to clothe itself in one color and one color only: orange.

Orange. Not a color I have ever chosen to hang in my closet, but the Chilean sky adorned herself from head to toe in outrageous and loud wonder.

Since moving here more than three months ago, my grandson stands each day at this window. There is always something interesting to see. Fishing boats in the bay. Fire trucks racing down the four-lane coastal highway. Police cars with sirens blaring. Traffic jams of commuters traveling to work and home again. Micah provides a minute-by-minute commentary on the current events occurring twelve stories below.

But he also watches the sun. Maybe because he knows bedtime is soon to follow.

Or maybe he watches the sunset for the same reason I do:

because it is beautiful.

But more than that.

The beauty points to what is eternal, it proclaims only God could make something so incredible.

"He has made everything beautiful in its time," Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, "He has also set eternity in the human heart...."

Created beauty points to a Creator that brings us face to face with the reality that there is Someone Bigger out there. The ocean echoes this truth. As does a hummingbird dipping into red blossoms. As does every sunset.

Perhaps this is the reason we find ourselves walking on beaches. Climbing mountains. Or looking heavenward.

The eternal in us hears the star song and everything inside us desires to join the refrain.

So we find ourselves gazing out windows.

Whether we are a three-year-old boy, a hard-working mom or dad, or a visiting grandma. Whether we speak Spanish or English, or live in Chile or the United States. The song is sung across the globe in every language.

"The heavens declare the glory of God: the skies proclaim the work of his hands," the Psalmist writes in Psalm 19:1. He continues in verse 4, "Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world."

Sometimes in the relentless days of negative headlines, grim diagnoses and mundane repetition, I struggle to hear God. I struggle to find Him. To believe He is beautiful. Or good.

The words in my day shout so loudly. Cancer! Divorce! Death! War! Accident! Job loss!

My heart needs to hear something that is louder than all these words. All the negative words. The words twist and darken the eternal truth until I find myself believing a lie.

"Theologians call God's communication through the created world the 'natural revelation' of God," Steve DeWitt writes in Eyes Wide Open. "This is contrasted with what is called 'special revelation,' when God speaks in words (the Bible) or through Jesus (the incarnation.)"

Both revelations tell us one thing - God speaks to us and wants us to know Him. He speaks to us! He speaks to me! He wants you to know Him!

On days when I can't seem to hear Him speaking to my heart or speaking through His written word, I can discover Him in the skies.

Sometimes the words come in a whisper, but on that day in Chile, the truth came in a boisterous shout as God pulled the most flamboyant orange from heaven's closet and flung the material across the Chilean sky as He clothed the horizon in a blaze of glory.

I discovered truth while gazing from a twelfth-floor window.

God is beautiful. God is constant. God is good. God wants to be known.

******Since returning from Chile, I have set the alarm on my phone to chime at sunrise and sunset, so I can take a moment to pause in my day to reflect on the beauty God has made, to give thanks, and to let my heart join the star song. Sometimes I pray for other concerns, but often I am simply quiet as I let God, through His creation, speak the truth I need to hear.

I realize I need this. Through God's created work, He is healing things in me that twisted and distorted during the last five years of cancer. I think I am doing fine, until I hear the words from a friend: "I have cancer."

"The cancer has moved to my brain."

"She died last night."

Then, I find myself in the downward spiral. But there is something worse than the downward spiral and that is to feel absolutely nothing at all.

I need the truth of the star song.

Through the month of April, I'm going to see where this twice-a-day discipline takes me. I will share stories on this blog. I will also post photos of beauty on Facebook and on Twitter at #boomerangbeauty.

Would you like to join me?

I'm curious where this journey will take us. I don't have any other writers lined up. I don't have any future blog posts figured out. Eternity is whispering from my heart and I am a young child standing at a window. And yet, sometimes I feel old. Very old.

I need the truth of the star song.

"Beauty boomerangs from God into created beauty, then through the senses and soul of the image-bearer, and finally back to God with praise and glory." - Steve DeWitt in Eyes Wide Open, a book I highly recommend. As the back cover states, "This is a book about our beautiful God who designed our craving for beauty to lead us back to Him.”

Please join me at the window.