I was down in Arkansas one evening last summer when the storm hit—a great clash in the heavens of solar wind sweeping off the sun’s surface and crashing into our atmosphere. The aurora borealis–a geomagnetic storm–was raging somewhere over the Canadian Rockies, but on a hot evening in Arkansas, things were quiet. We had a fire going in a little pit in the churchyard. We were tossing horseshoes and roasting marshmallows, so we didn’t know scientists were calling for “unsettled levels of geomagnetic activity” that evening. I wouldn’t have known at all if I hadn’t seen a text just as I was packing up my lawn chair. My family up north were shooting pictures back and forth of a deep magenta sky that melted into blue like watercolors.
I have long dreamt about traveling far North to see the Lights. They call it a Bucket List item, probably because these are the things we want to see before we all kick the bucket and die. Sometimes, I think about the number of things on that list I will likely never see: the Scottish coast under a rolling fog; Louisa May Alcott’s home in Concord in the fall; Oxford, the Alaskan tundra, Norway, Galilee, Maine. Maybe I’ll surprise myself, but it’s likely I’ll never “see the world”— at least, not in that sense.
In another sense, I have seen the world already.
While Jared visited with the last few church members that night, I walked to the fenceline behind the church, where the little building eclipsed the lone streetlight. I folded my arms around me and held my breath. The hemline of the sky was dipped in the purple of a prince’s robe. There was something rather royal about it. This wasn’t someone else’s photo, and I hadn’t flown far North, yet my eyes had seen evidence of the King, the LORD of Hosts and Father of Lights. He’d brought the Northern Lights South to a churchyard in rural Arkansas, where the hay was thick in the fields and the cows were asleep.
Jared joined me at the fenceline, and we watched it there for a long time.
“I never thought I’d see this,” I said.
I meant that I never thought I’d see it there.
The whole earth is full of the Lord’s glory, but sometimes, we push ourselves to the edges to find it. We make Bucket Lists that spill us out somewhere new to see something grand, and I am grateful for the grand things I’ve seen: the lighthouses off Cape Cod Bay, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at dusk, the crashing waters of Big Sur, California. I am also grateful for the maple in my yard that’s crimson, and the low Ozark Hills I drove between yesterday. I am grateful when I get to see the world, and I am grateful for the world I’ve seen.
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