Declaration of the Stars

It's before sunrise. The stars are twinkling small and far away on a January morning in Minnesota. The moon is resting low, round and full in my rear view mirror. Hubby will be flying out soon to a different time zone and I am driving home to sleeping sons and daughters and daughters' sons.

 Those stars, they remind me of words I have kept in a cardboard box and have moved from house to house. They are the words I found lying among household trinkets and discarded treasures on a garage sale table for fifty cents. I don't know how they caught my eye, framed in square gold ridges, but they did, so I gave the lady some pocket change and took them home. And I'm thinking them over, as I have done so often, how they ring true and I agree and I should take them out of that box and find a home for them near a wide open window where they belong. I wonder if the words were breathed out frosty on a morning like this?

I never behold the stars that I do not feel that I am looking in the face of God. I can see how it might be possible for a person to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how one could look into the heavens and say there is no God.   ~         Abraham Lincoln

So when I look just around the perimeters of my own life, this eye-level view crowded by people and events passing in and out of focus, into the face of all of it, and if this were the only view I had, then yes, I might begin to wonder. But when I look up and see the expanse of beauty, beauty in the dark even,  I am sure that the words of the Psalmist are true: 

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.  Psalm 19: 1 - 4  

And into the corners of my little world. The heavens declare to me the vastness of God. They tell me of the way He is everywhere. The way He is certain. The way He is above and over and around me and those I love.  And I remember how He said "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8 and 9. Whew, I am thankful, because my ways and my thoughts are not always so certain. Not always so hopeful. Very often colored by my present circumstances. And bound to change. But He " is the same yesterday and today and forever." Hebrews 3:8 Just as the constellations are sure in the heavens.

Such peace in that.