A Lesson From the Clouds

My friends, as I write this the time is 1:00am.  I have been outside tonight, looking up at the sky and breathing in the silence of the forest that surrounds my Ozark Mountain home.  It is in these quiet moments alone that I have always found my solace.  The forest has always been my teacher.  Even as a boy, I never did well learning inside of a square box.  I still have an elementary school teacher’s report card informing my mother that I did ‘too much daydreaming’ in class.  Indeed, it was true.  My daydreams were my escape from the coldness of that square box.  I did not fit there in that place with the desks all in their neat little rows and life’s questions in tidy numbered lines on paper.  No, the lessons that have guided me throughout my life have always come from the wonderfully untidy, vastly complex, nonlinear order of nature.

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Tonight’s lesson was in the sky.  The air was warm, and the clouds were thick, yet patchy.  And they were rolling, moving fast.  As I sat with my eyes cast upward, every so often the clouds would part, revealing the starry sky and the moon behind them.  Then they would close back up and hide the stars from my sight once again.  It was beautiful to watch this atmospheric motion of life.  So, what’s the lesson?  Allow me…

Sometimes our life can fill up with things that block out the light, things that keep us from seeing clearly.  Those things are like clouds, swirling and billowing and impeding our view.  In cloudy times, we can get confused; we can lose our perspective and even our faith.  It is easy to want to look away and not face things.  And yet, if we find the courage to fix our eyes on the swirling, billowing things we can’t make sense of, an amazing thing happens; the clouds part and the truth is revealed.  The light shines through, even if only for a moment, and wisdom is given to us.  Answers are given to us.  Direction is given to us.  And clarity is given to us.  So, no matter how dim your view may be; no matter how hard it may be to see clearly, keep your eyes fixed on those cloudy things, because they will open up when the moment is right and show you the way to the stars…

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