69-The Sun is Always Rising Somewhere

That dreaded alarm clock! How dare it wake you before the sun is up on those chilly winter mornings? Some nerve!! But life goes on, so you drag yourself in the darkness of morning to the kitchen.

Have you ever been at your kitchen table sipping your coffee or busily prepping your kids lunch for the day or filling the cat’s water bowl when seemingly out of nowhere the sun outside your window, begs for you to look up?

I had this very moment sitting at our newly made window bench reading my devotional for the morning. The sunrise and sunset have this amazing talent of interrupting even the most interesting of conversations between a group of friends and makes us pause just to take in the view. You fumble for your phone trying to see if perhaps this time your camera will accurately convey the brilliance and variety of color splashing the sky in front of you. We all know it just will never do the scene justice. This moment on my window bench I noticed two things about the sun that reminded me about our very own lives.

Number one, the sun when it rises and sets is very much like the beginning and end of life. It grabs our attention just like a new baby in a car seat at the grocery store or the way loss of life makes us all pause and remember and admire the light of the person we loved and will to continue to love.

Number two, and certainly most relevant to the work of Project Forty, the sun is doing incredibly important work during the day, the in between. If we looked closer or perhaps from a different perspective, it’s brilliance would shine in ways we’ve never known. Because really the sun is ALWAYS rising and setting somewhere.

In our lives, we have countless moments of success and failures. They feel mundane, pointless, and inconvenient. They get in the way of life, we think to ourselves with a great deal of frustration. “If only I could get past this obstacle, then I could really live.” Oh goodness, how many times have I muttered that to myself? With Project Forty, our honor is to be a part of the all the ins and outs of the middle for the lives of these teens and young adults. We’ve been gifted with the ability to see the brilliance in the mundane rises and falls. The hiking pack just not fitting right or getting lost on the way to the crag and the eventual frustration show by a participant to the smile on their face when they make it up their first climb. These are equally brilliant to us.

Don’t mistake your everyday life as getting in the way of life. That IS life. It’s the rising and falling of each day. It’s where the REAL work is done.

-Jen