God's Masterpiece

Photo by Emily Kindervater

Say what you want. Call me sappy. Take away my "man card. Do whatever you want to do, but I love sunsets. There's just something about them that when I look at them and see the beauty, the way the colors blend with each other, their vibrancy, it takes my breath away. On a cool summer evening, I could be driving home, or sitting on a deck watching the sky overshadow the earth like no painting could.

Over the years I catch myself with the temptation to stop my car as I'm coming home from a long day at work, dreamily staring at the otherworldly colors dancing in the sky. It's a wonder I could make it home at all without stopping. In the Fall, at harvest time, the colors close in on the earth and touch the corn stalks with their bright yellows meeting with the vibrant reds, yellows, oranges, and purples of God's paint brush. Never was there such a canvas in all the museums of art.

Perhaps the most beautiful of sunsets comes right after an event that would not lead to beauty. The most beautiful of sunsets come after the severity of a storm. After something so ugly and destructive, the last thing anyone may think of is beauty. And yet, after a storm the sky is filled with brilliant colors. How could something so ugly and destructive be the backdrop to such a tapestry of color?

There is a science to the formation of the sunset. Each color is dependent on the wavelength of that color and how it reflects off molecules in the atmosphere (Fiegl, 2013). But that's not the coolest part of the entire process. The coolest part of the process is when the storm washes away the dust and the grime from the air molecules, allowing the light to reflect off of freshly cleaned molecules to move more freely than they had before (Cokinos, 2023). The storm washes away the dirt and the grime and allows for the brilliant colors to be seen by the rest of the world.

The storm washes away the dirt and the grime and allows for the brilliant colors to be seen by the rest of the world.

It's easy to be caught up in the beauty of the night sky that one could easily forget the storm that came before. As a matter of fact, when confronted with the beauty of the heavens, we hesitate to think that the beauty we now see was formed as a direct result of the ugliness of the storm. In witnessing the beauty of the night sky we forget that only a few minutes or hours ago, we may have been overwhelmed the power of the storms destruction. The night sky, full of brilliant colors, now give us a sense of calm or peace, a stark contrast with what came before.

There is beauty within the storms. Though we do not see it in the moment, we see the results. We live in a world of extremes. We see the beauty and we forget the storm or we remember the storm and never see the beauty afterwards. Why is that? Is it so hard to acknowledge what be the most beautiful comes at the price of pain? Think of any number of different examples that pain and beauty need each other. Think of the way the iron smith pounds precious metal into the shape that produces the greater result. That metal has to be burned in fire and pounded for the end results. I think of my own journey in walking. I had to stretch beyond my pain level to be mobile. Pain and beauty can be linked. And when they are the end result is much more beautiful than one can imagine.

Is it so hard to acknowledge what be the most beautiful comes at the price of pain?

We see constantly in the New Testament that beauty is also linked with suffering. I think of James when he writes that trials help us to strengthen and solidify our faith (James 1:2). Peter tells us that the storms prove the authenticity of our faith (1 Peter 1:6-7). The clearest Scripture of this is what Paul writes in Romans 5:3-5:

"Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Romans 5:3-5

It is sometimes through the storms of life that we understand and experience the greater hope that we could only find in Christ Jesus. When we just acknowledge the beauty, we cannot appreciate fully what it took to make that beauty. It's when we see the entire journey that we fully realize how beautiful the sunset is.

I love my sunsets. I love what comes after the storm. And thought I don't want to admit it, I see how the storm produces that beauty. It is still a daily challenge for me to appreciate the storm, especially when I'm going through it. But when I acknowledge both the beauty of the sunset and the power of the storm. Call me sappy, but somehow the sunset just seems more amazing!

References

Cokinos, S. (2023, August 2). Here’s why sunrises, sunsets are more vibrant after storms. WKMG. https://www.clickorlando.com/weather/2023/08/02/heres-why-sunrises-sunsets-are-more-vibrant-after-storms/

Fiegl, A. (2013, October 29). Red Sky at Night: The Science of Sunsets. Science. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/131027-sunset-sky-change-color-red-clouds-science