Look Up!

I find cemeteries to be wonderfully peaceful places. I love to wander along the rows of graves and read the headstones, looking at names and dates and the occasional cryptic messages carved in granite for those left behind. Many make me stop for a minute and think about my life and the way that I am living it in the time that I have left. Understandably, my eyes are usually looking down at the ground as I make my way through the burial plots.

But not so come fall. When I walk though the same grassy hillsides in the autumn months I find a message for me not on the stones on the ground but high in the treetops. My eyes are forever lifting to the colorful branches that shade these final resting places, heeding some internal urge to simply look up.

Truly the answers I seek to the situations I’m faced with every day come not from the world around me but the one above me. Whatever the spiritual condition of those buried there when they left this earth, they now know the truth about the love of God and Jesus’ death on the cross to save us. The lessons they may have learned too late to help them are now mine for the taking if I will just go beyond the obvious beauty of the surroundings and heed the call to look up to God while I still have the chance.

“My voice You shall hear in the morning, O Jehovah;
in the morning I will direct my prayer to You, and I will look up.”
(Psalm 5:3 MKJV)

I took my coffee out on the deck this morning and brushed fallen leaves off the plastic lawn chair I wanted to sit in. For some reason its position didn't seem right to me; whether it was too near the edge of the deck or too close to the grill and other chairs, I'm not sure...I just didn't feel comfortable. So I did a little rearranging to make space for it, and then pulled it a little more to the center of the deck area. I don't think I suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but I surely acted like it this morning.

Perhaps God was just using the chair to illustrate the state of my spiritual life this morning and to give me some possible remedies for the situation. I feel a little out of sorts with Him today. I had a wonderful time spiritually last week and a great weekend, complete with a wonderful church service yesterday morning and a good evening at home last night. But today I feel strangely out of place, and maybe a little distant, uncomfortably crowded by the duties of the day already pressing in on my spirit.

So I did as God suggested, rearranging things a little bit. I pushed back the to-do list for a little while, and brushed off the worries that had accumulated overnight. And then I pulled myself a little closer in spiritually, much as I would do while sitting around a bonfire on a chilly night - pulling my chair in a little closer to the fire till I felt its warmth once more. I mentally rearranged the events of my day to give me a little extra time with Him.

I'm reminded that each day can be as colorful and vibrant as the changing autumn leaves on the trees, or as dry and dead as the fallen ones on my back deck. What I make of it is largely my choice.

"Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you..."
(James 4:8 MKJV)