goodnight moon

My bike is in the shop again. I had the forks rebuilt back in October, but the right seal is not sealing and the wind blows oil all over my pant leg and now the front end shimmies. So back it goes. And Honda is paying for it! Honda won’t even work on my bike because it is a 1985 model, but they’ll replace the seals for free when someone else works on it. Ramble ramble. I was really just trying to say that I had to drive my truck tonight for my night ride. That was ok, because the caged feeling was offset by the ability to listen to World Service all alone and very loud. At that volume, I can sing almost every note that Martin Smith offers on the record. Tonight I was drawn by Mountains High, a beautiful picture of trust when one might seem abandoned.

When I was a kid I used to watch the sun go down behind the mountain and fantasize that I could go over there and see it at rest. I remember wondering which hill it went behind. Between my house and Huntington, there were many hills. Some were only minutes away, but I doubted that those were the ones where the sun rested. Actually, I don’t remember not knowing that the sun really didn’t set behind a hill, so I don’t know if I was just playing with my imagination or what. But I remember these thoughts. You know how kids are. I remember gathering info at school that directly contradicted my information from the bible. But somehow in my kid brain, it all just seemed like two packets of info, and didn’t pose a problem for me. That’s probably how I felt about the sun. Sure, it’s not really over there behind that hill, but I’d still like to go find out for sure.

So tonight I looked up at Venus then the moon with Mars dangling from its chin like some Southtown jewelry, and watched it grow and turn yellow as it made its way toward the trees on the other side of the lake. It was disappearing too quickly, so I decided to chase it. I drove west, past the trees on the other side of the lake. To my delight, it didn’t sit down, just stayed up above the tree line. I drove, it floated. Yellow and large with a ruby stud in its chin. I followed it until it finally gave up and sat down somewhere across the Savanna river.

Your ways are high, too high for us; Your ways are high, too high for us.

Only God can understand the mind of God. He doesn’t have to justify anything to us. He doesn’t even have share anything about Himself with us. We can look around and look up and know that there is something greater, something bigger than us, something incomprehensible. It is only by His grace that he came down here to show Himself to us in a way that we could begin to understand.

I never really made it to the moon tonight. I guess it never really sat down so that I could find it. Once though, a star was created to lead some folks to a place where they could find its creator. They followed and found. It’s amazing the peace one can find when he keeps following and keeps looking up.