Into the Deep, Vast Blueness

This is not the hill.

There is this road I take on my commute to work that I want to tell you about. The lead-in to the road is fine. It's town. It’s houses and small roads and a tree here or there.  

It is a two-lane road so small they didn’t bother to stripe the center line. It climbs a little hill crowned by trees before disappearing down the other side. This tree-crowned disappearing act makes it look like the road simply vanishes and only sky is left. It is an abrupt transition between the terrestrial and the celestial. It is the curtain between the material and the spiritual drawn tight so that you feel like you can almost see through. 

And then... then there are those mornings like this morning where that curtain is split in two. 

I was riding my bike up the hill in the quiet of the morning. I was the loudest thing on the road at the moment. My old bicycle was creaking in protest, my breath was chugging alone from the effort, and my eyes were pinned at the point on the road about fifteen feet in front of me. There was nothing special about that point in the road, but lifting my head further felt like too much effort. And then I lifted my head to see that end-of-the-world view so I could imagine myself floating off into space. But I didn’t see that view, not really. I saw the ineffable. 

I couldn’t see the rising sun, but I could see the effects of it. The clouds stretched across the pale blue sky. Burning with reds and oranges. Lit with the power of the hidden sun. Above that, the pale blue darkened into an oceanic blue-gray. There was a depth and vastness to the sky, as if I was in danger of slipping and falling up and drifting away until I was a blip in its infinite expanse. There was something in that moment, something about the light and the clouds and the silence and the float-away-into-space-ness of the road that stirred in me a longing for the divine. I felt like I could keep riding past the end of the road and go up and up and up until I approached heaven’s throne where I belong and would find true belonging. 

To put it another way, I was struck with a nostalgia for a place I’d never been. 

There is, in all of us, a part that longs for a presence that nothing on this earth can fill. We are made to long after relationship with God and to search for a home that cannot be found on earth. I pray that you find Him, and He leads you home.