I took this photo on an evening drive down to Glasgow. I was looking across the Mearns to the west and stopped at a layby for ten minutes to gaze. Then continued to drive, this time with more care and attentiveness to a world both fragile and durable, and to a rhythm whose regularity recurs in the Psalms as a metaphor of God's faithfulness and the dailiness of blessing. "From sunrise to sunset the Lord's name is to be praised."
In the Fiddler on the Roof, the image of sunrise and sunset describes growth and maturity, as the love of parents for children begins to relinquish and set free while still acknowledging that the investment of our deepest feelings in those we love, and enlarging the circle of those we love, is life's high calling. And in the lyrics, the recognition that life is movement and change, happiness and tears, and what we hang on to, what hangs on to us, is that same rhythm of faithfulness and the recurring cycle of light and life, sunrise, sunset.
Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the days
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers
Blossoming even as we gaze
Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears
"Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father, there is no shadow of turning with thee..." Well, yes, that's true - though there are shadows, and sometimes it feels like they are cast by the back of God! And then you see a sunset, and our faith holds on for dear life to mystery, and we are smitten by a beauty redolent of love, gently revealing the goodness and mercy that surely follows us all the days of our lives, sunrise, sunset.
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