Unless you were living under a rock, or hiding out in the woods for a technology/society detox weekend, you probably heard all about the major solar activity, and ensuing geomagnetic storm that slammed into Earth May 10-11th and sent both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres into an absolute frenzy of late night and very early morning photography. The Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis danced across skies much closer to the equator than generally happens, and the internet exploded with thousands of amateur and professional attempts to capture the beauty. And although the Auroras were visible to the naked eye, their real intensity was only truly observable when viewed through a camera. Colours that were a little pale and hazy, became vibrant and defined when the proper tools were employed.
On the Friday night when the colours were the most intense and covered almost the whole expanse of the sky, I made an attempt at capturing a memento to show my boys in the morning. Juggling the newest member of our family and my phone was not easy, so my photos turned out blurry and oddly angled. But the colours were there in all their spectacle and my boys were suitably impressed with the results.
On the Saturday we pushed back bed time considerably, in the hopes that they could experience some of the magic first hand. There had been reports that between 9 and 10 pm would be a good time to see them, but unfortunately by 10:30 there were no auroras visible where we live and the boys had to be tucked in to avoid catastrophic meltdowns the following day. (Seeing as it was Mother's Day for us, I was not interested in pushing my luck too far.) I snapped a few pictures and we put the munchkins and ourselves to bed. I later found out that there had been some beautiful colours to see, but they came much later than I had stayed up to watch for them.
Looking back at the photos, you can see more than what was apparent to us at the time. The pictures that I took on the second day still show evidence, although faint and low on the horizon, of the effects of the geomagnetic storm that would have otherwise passed unseen. The whole weekend was an opportunity to experience something that is rarely visible where I live, but I could have missed it entirely. I could have gone about my evenings, never once looking up. It is certainly not my custom to stand in my yard at midnight taking pictures. However, if I had not gone outside, I would never have experienced the Northern Lights at all. And if I had not taken my phone to capture the light, I would never have been able to see the extent of the intense waves of colour across the starry sky.
As beautiful as the first night was, it is the second night that I keep coming back to, even a week later. I missed the signs of what was coming, and didn't even see what was already there. Far too frequently I miss the way God is working. Sometimes it is because it doesn't look the way I thought it might, or I am using the wrong tools for the job. Other times, it is because I am not even looking at all. We see this happening with people in Scripture too. All throughout the Old Testament God's work is being missed or forgotten by His people. In Genesis, God's gift of the garden is taken for granted and His direction is ignored, resulting in the fracturing of Humanity's relationship with Him. In Exodus, His amazing works of deliverance on behalf of His chosen people is forgotten, and the Israelites essentially grumble and whine about missing the slavery they had just been freed from. In Deuteronomy, God commands three feasts for the Israelites to observe, giving them opportunities to look back and remember His faithfulness. In Isaiah, He points them forward to life after exile and further ahead to the coming of Christ. He commands them to look at their past and the evidence of all He has done for them, and He encourages them to look forward with Hope to all He still has in store for them.
They were looking right at it and missed it all together. They caught glimpses of the glorious story God was inviting them into, but missed the bigger picture. Israel missed Jesus, first in the Scriptures and then in the flesh, because they were filtering everything through the wrong lens. They didn't see their Salvation walking among them, because they had already decided how it was going to look. They were waiting for a "Moses versus Pharaoh" style showdown, so they didn't see the softer shades of what Jesus was doing then and there. It was a strange dichotomy, because they failed to look back and really see God's faithfulness, but they also got stuck assuming that God would always move the way He had before.
I don't want to forget what came before, but I don't want to miss what is happening now by superimposing that past over the future and ignoring anything that doesn't line up. It's a fine line to walk, this simultaneous remembering and forgetting. Using Scripture to filter our view of the World, we can capture the parts we cannot otherwise see clearly, and get a fuller vision of the grand movements of Holy Spirit as they are happening, and we can more easily identify the softer shades we missed when we look back. Only then will we be able to see the breadth of what God is painting with our lives.
Like auroras across starry skies.
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