When I awaken each morning, I always look outside the window and scan the eastern sky. It’s not that I think I’ve missed the trumpet sound that will signal the “calling up” of all Christians. It’s just a reminder to me that someday that event will happen, and I can look forward to it.
Early this morning the northern hemisphere sky that filled my eyes took my breath away. The stars shone so vividly that I could easily pick out the constellations I knew, and the fingernail moon was suspended so beautifully and lightly over the horizon it seemed it would simply float away at any moment. Even though it was twenty-four degrees and snowdrifts still covered our back deck, I had to step outside the man-made envelope of my house and be swallowed up in the God-created vastness of His handiwork.
For the past three years, there is a single line that crosses my mind each time I view the stars: Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, but windows in Heaven through which our loved ones look down on us, and know we are safe.
I read this inscription on a memorial marker in a cemetery just after my mother died. And still today, when I look up and see the stars, yes, I know they are scientifically provable masses of gases held together by their own gravity, I know they are spiritually declaring the glory of God, but I also feel comforted in the metaphysical fancy that they are windows through which my mother is at this moment maybe looking down at me, her daughter, who is at this moment looking up toward the eastern sky.
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