And Rachel is all grown up and wants to be an astronaut

I wait for the LORD; my soul waits for Him; in His word is my hope. My soul waits for the LORD, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. Psalm 130:4

The thing about watchmen in the night is that they never really doubt that the sun will rise.

Not really.

It might feel like it sometimes, as they pace the rampart both to warm cold bones and to keep from falling asleep. They might jump up and down a few times to regain feeling in stiff joints. Certainly time moves slowly. Even without a watch or cell phone, the seconds swell into silent drops whose surface tension builds, slowly slowly, and finally explode into the waiting puddle below. One, one thousand.

But our God is not bound by this fourth dimension any more than the pulsing particles that wrap their strands around our experienced existence. It too is held loosely in the palm of His hand, much like the billions of galaxies that made Brandon and Cameron and Rachel’s eyes sparkle last night at family dinner. So many times the childhood Rachel would wrap up in a thick blanket and sit outside in the night and watch brilliance spin across the sky.

Our God is mighty and who can stand against Him?

That was the click of the blinking red light alarm clock at 4:15 this morning. And may that be the click of my heart today, the railway track sounds marking the seconds. Without the static of a GE AM/FM clock radio fuzzing the clarity as I move through the busyness of the day, beginning with stepping out into the starlit near dark with a blue towel draped around my shoulders, and ending with final crunching footsteps up the gravel driveway under the self-same stars. As I pause and look into each pair of eyes, may my heart too sing.

Our God is mighty and who can stand against Him?

And in Steinbeck’s The Pearl the people of the Gulf know this: Part of the far shore disappeared into a shimmer that looked like water. There was no certainty in seeing, no proof that what you saw was there or was not there. And they expected all places were that way, and it was not strange to them.

Nothing is wanting to me. In green pastures He hath settled me.