those clouds.

Did anyone else see the sky that I saw tonite?
We were on the last leg of our trip home from vacation; sailing down 71 south en route to state route 73 (aka the road to heaven). And the sky, oh the sky, and those clouds. The clouds looked like they were from a painting, but they were right there in front of me, some almost in my reach it seemed. I pushed my face up as close to the window as possible so I could see more sky and more clouds. My eye was caught by flickering colors on the edges of one larger cloud. As the cloud moved and the car moved, I realized the colors were the refracted light from the Sun that was creeping through that hole in the cloud. I couldn't take my eyes away from the light as the Sun made its way more clearly into the opening of the cloud. Though its brightness strained my eyes, I couldn't turn away. At one point, I actually saw the circle of the Sun, its rays, light, and brightness shielded by thin layers of cloud.
And then I realized this is how the prophets and many others describe encountering the Lord. He is a burst of light, so bright and strong that you must strain your eyes and not look directly at Him. But you can't take your eyes off Him once you've seen Him. Staring up through the clouds into the streaming sunlight, I felt that the Lord was saying to me, "I forgive you; I wish you would never choose anything over me or time with me, but I forgive you. And here I am now, shining for you, SO LOOK AT ME. Those clouds might seem nice, but I am the real beauty here, I am what you should really be searching the skies for." And I pray that I would search, both wide and deep.


sidebar: We stayed near UVA on the drive down, and walked around the campus and ate dinner there, and let me just tell you... it's beautiful. And I saw two rainbows while standing in the middle of their campus.