12,192.
Twelve-thousand, one-hundred, and ninety-two, that’s how many meters you are above the ground. You’ve been in a metal tube, a mini city escaping into the sky until it is forced to come back to earth, for almost eleven hours. The pressure of this one has been a bit intense. You feel the dry air in your nose and mouth as you suck in what feels to be slightly less oxygen than is typical on the ground. There’s slight pressure in your chest and your head feels a little light. You’re a little tired despite the two cups of coffee and a few hours of a blackness called sleep from between the hours of about four and eight a.m. – per the local time of your last layover. Time zones are strange beasts.
You’ve been outrunning the dawn for eleven hours. It’s beginning to catch you, slowly breaking the horizon behind you. It interrupts the dark of the earth and the black of the sky by prying them apart with its rainbow. The black ground met with scarlet, blending to orange and gold, transitioning to brilliant blue, violently deep purple and then, black again. The rainbow slowly wedges its way in between the walls of blackness, forcing them to part.
………………………..…………………………
Around four a.m., we were over India. Tiny clusters of light gleamed from the ground, trying to mirror the stars above. We flew between two seas of glimmering darkness. The stars, layers upon layers of stars. All the ones you can see in a dark field at night or in the middle of the mountains, and yet, there was another layer behind them. Blurry, like so many snowflakes falling from a night sky, they hung suspended. The arc of the earth, stood as a dark line, lightless, with stars above and humanity below.
Humanity below. Trying to bring their light into the darkness. Lighting up the space around us, we shout into the darkness of a vast universe that we are here, a desperate cry to prove to ourselves that we are not alone. Inadvertently in this cry, we mimic the lights placed in the universe by the Creator, by the One who actually wants relationship with us. We cry out, whether we know it’s to Him or not, desperate to not be alone. We are all searching for connection, yet are prisoners to our own personal boxes. Somehow, we have the ability to feel alone amidst a sea of humanity. Why is this?
A sea of humanity, a sea sprinkled with light. There’s a song in which one of the primary lines is, “I won’t ever let you go,” (Won’t Let You Go, Zayde Wolf). This is how God feels about the world. His heart for people is so real. He sees humanity. He sees our loneliness, our desperation for something more, our hunger for meaning. He is there, wanting us to choose Him, wanting for a broken world to stop going their own way, to stop and to see His light. He is the dawn, the light who is always there, never resting in His pursuit of us. He has literally worked all of history, since the very beginning, so that we can have a relationship with Him. The God who is powerful enough to create enough energy, from nothing, to fuel billions of stars, suspended in space, with one word, wants us.
Yet all the little stars on the ground in India, all the golden rivers of roads and the sparkles of the cities in Turkey, and so few of them know the One who made the light they mirror. So few of them have never heard, or who hear, but say no. They stay, trying to imitate the lights of heaven, yet falling so short. They spend their entire lives, evading the dawn.
