A late night stroll down the airport runway.

-

 "God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers, and clouds and stars." - Martin Luther

I have always been someone that connects with God through the beauty of God's creation.

I regularly try to retreat into nature, but in recent years, these moments have been few and far between.

No matter how busy we are and how much noise we fill our lives with, sometimes we are unexpectedly forced into situations where we will hear God's voice loudly and clearly as if spoken through a megaphone.

Last Friday, I experienced one of these special occasions. 

I was attending an art exhibition in Bethlehem with my wife and child. It was held in an airplane hangar at our local airport. While I am certainly not an art connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination, I thoroughly enjoyed walking through the exhibit, appreciating the beautiful paintings and the emotional responses that they brought up within me.

Due to the late opening of the exhibition, a short while after being there, our 11-month-old daughter started getting miserable. This is understandable as it was well past her usual bedtime.

She has always been a difficult sleeper (she has serious FOMO like her dad) so I decided to take her for a walk in her pram to try and coerce her to sleep. 

So it was there on Friday night at 9pm that I found myself walking up and down the runway of Bethlehem Airport, praying that there were no late night flights scheduled to land.

One of the benefits of living in a small town is that one is able to fully experience the beauty of a starry night sky, without the pollution of nearby city lights. Walking back and forth on the runway, staring at the beautiful night sky full of stars, I was suddenly teleported to a different world. A place where I was reminded of the immensity and great mysteries of God. A place where I was filled with God's peace and enveloped in Her love.

Sometimes, when we get so busy that we forget to withdraw to the places where we connect most intimately with the Divine, God provides a way.

"Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing". - Isaiah 40:26 

Image Source: Lubo Minar


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Leap of Faith

-
Image
I recently did the Lake Eland Extreme Zip-line with some of my friends from Pietermaritzburg. The zip-line is 1 100 meters long and reaches max speeds of up to 160km's per hour. All that is keeping you from falling hundreds of meters to an inevitable death is 2 cables and a harness that my hysterical brain was telling me would not have been out of place as a car's seat-belt. We arrived early and waited for half an hour as we contemplated our life choices up to this point. Eventually we were all kitted up and ready to go. While I wouldn't say that I have Acrophobia - an extreme fear of heights - as I looked out over the gorge that we would be flying through, breaking the national speed-limit in the process, it is fair to say that my stomach started churning and my legs turned to jelly. It was at this point that I'm sure many of us were trying to think of any reasonable excuse that would get us out of this jump without seeming like a coward. One of the thin
Read more

The God of Running, Talents and Passions

-
Image
Over the past couple of months I have developed a passion for running.  I am not terribly good at it and I doubt I will take it very far, but something about training hard over the past couple of months has spiked an enthusiasm in me that I cannot really explain. It is during my time running on the road when I am able to clear my mind from stress and think about all the things God has been doing in my life. Image Source:  Lucas Favre Yesterday I completed my first full marathon.  It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done, but it felt good to complete something that I had worked so long and hard to accomplish. Some of you might be wondering why someone would run for hours, putting themselves through extreme pain just to receive a T-shirt and a medal. I don't blame you. I used to wonder the same. Not everyone is passionate about the same thing. Not everyone has the same talents or skills. But I believe that God blesses everyone with talents,
Read more

Harmony of Grace

-
Image
Image Source:  张 学欢 Why did I decide to start this blog? Why call it Harmony of Grace?  One definition for the word harmony is "living in peace and mutual understanding with others." I have always been fascinated with music and in my opinion, the musical definition of the word harmony has a more accurate depiction of the word's true meaning. In musical terms, a harmony is "a note or group of notes that compliment the notes in the melody (main tune of the song)." There are many different possible harmonies, but if played/sung correctly, they all compliment the melody and emphasize the beauty of the musical arrangement as a whole. When I had my first encounter with Jesus, the concept of harmony became much more real in my life. But how does harmony have anything to do with God's grace? I believe that God's grace can be seen in the world we live in, through various means, as a complimentary harmony to God's nature an
Read more