sunrise

I went to the desert to say goodbye to my mother-in-law.  She is dying, cancer and chemo are draining all the life from her body and she has courageously surrendered to God, to death, to a different kind of victory than we had hoped and prayed for.  My family and I left Denver very, very early in the morning.  Now, I am not what you would call a “morning person” and I don’t see very many sunrises.  But as I flew into Phoenix that terrible morning, weighed down with the burden of a last goodbye, I watched the sun rise up over the desert.  And it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. God showing off.  Purples, pinks, oranges stretched out across an endless sky and an endless desert.  The richest of colors cast as far as my eyes could see.  It was a new day and the desert was full of unspeakable beauty.  It seemed as the sunrise held a whisper of a promise that God is unfolding and unveiling each new day.  The lonely desert filled up with light seemed to say he is at work, he is restoring, redeeming.  In that moment the beauty took my breath away.  But, as I knew it must, the moment ended and I could feel us descending into something I wanted most wholeheartedly to run away from.  The sunrise felt like a distant dream and I was left trying to reconcile how such a beautiful, wonder-filled world can also hold such pain, such brokenness, death.  I simply cannot reconcile it.  There is just too much of both the beauty and the broken.