Losing Sight of the Star

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

I lost sight of the star.

It was early, and dawn was breaking as we drove the winding mountain road on our way out to church for morning worship. Tall trees hemmed the road on either side, pines and firs and spruce. My brother drove, the car filled with three of my siblings and I, hushed with quiet. We aren’t ones for talking much early in the morning. The quiet of the preceding night’s rest still wrapped us about like a blanket. My nose pressed against the back window, I watched the sky slowly lightening with the advent of the new day. Dawn was coming, but no vibrant sunrise graced the sky yet. It was more of an absence of color, a sickly sort of yellow as the deep velvet blue of night slowly drained away. In the vault of sky above us I caught sight of one bright, persistent star, fighting for its place in the vastness of dawn, holding out bravely against the coming day. My eyes stayed fixed on it as I twisted in my seat to look back, until a bend in the road hid it from my sight.

Early mornings have always seemed special to me, immeasurably more precious than daylight hours. There’s a holiness about them, the interlude between the unconsciousness of sleep and the bright busyness of day. Time passes differently when the sky is ‘twixt dark and light. With the stars still keeping watch in their dance through the sky, and the pressures of the day not yet arrived, there is space and place for important things. The world is not yet awake, rushing fiercely into the race against time itself. The expectations of the day haven’t yet reared their heads and looked to us to fulfill them. There is quiet, and there is you, and there is God.

I once read a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that I have never been able to forget: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.” How lightly we take for granted the lasting beauty of the stars.  

Two things struck me that morning as we sped through the mountains, church-bound. Firstly, my own worries dwindled away in the light of that radiant star. I had most definitely NOT felt like getting up early that morning, a rush of stress flooding my consciousness immediately upon waking. But I realized that I was a speck of a girl, on a ball in space, and nothing that troubled me today would be remembered 100 years from now. As Samwise Gamgee realizes in one of my favorite passages from the Lord of the Rings, “there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its (the Shadow’s) reach.” There are things above that cannot be tainted by the weary stains of everyday life, and to remember that was an encouraging thought.

The other thing that came to mind was a wistful remembrance of Psalm 147:4: “He counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by name.” The flip side of the coin: I did matter. I was known and loved by the Maker of the stars, the One who named them and flung them into existence with a wave of His mighty hand, who unrolled the heavens like a blanket. The stars have traversed the midnight sky for thousands of years, held together by the love of God. So too, am I held forever in God’s loving hand.

I lost sight of the star that morning. But I faced forward in my seat and smiled. I was bound for a place of worship, to sit in the midst of quiet song in a hushed sanctuary as the stars outside faded from the sky in the splendor of coming day. But the stars would come again that night, and the one after, and the one after. And in the meantime, God kept watch over it all.

God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.