Faint Pink Light

 
 

It can be tempting in our daily busy-ness to focus on the complexities in our lives and forget that God's wisdom surpasses all understanding. Consider David's words in Psalm 139:


You have searched me, Lord,

    and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

    you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down;

    you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue

    you, Lord, know it completely.

You hem me in behind and before,

    and you lay your hand upon me.


In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, author Annie Dillard acknowledges the enormity of God's creation -- both spatially and generationally -- as she ponders the simplicity of a seashell:

At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin it passes a faint pink light, and almost as flexible as a straight razor. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve.

When you consider small, seemingly insignificant things in your life, do you see their beauty or dismiss them? What practices help you slow down to notice the “faint pink light” in the everyday?

Rev. Dr. Jennie A. Harrop