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Sunsets
by Foy Valentine
"Whatsoever things are...lovely...think on these things" Philippians 4:8.
The sunsets were spectacular in East Texas where I lived as a boy. The
house in which I was born and where I lived until I went away to college
was happily situated, particularly so if a body had an interest in
watching sunsets.
The lay of the land was just right. The place was on a gentle hill. There
was a good-sized draw to the west. Beyond the draw there was a big, open
field. Beyond the field was a clearing. The clearing then stretched
westward for about a thousand miles. Hardly a tree to mar the view, as the
saying went. The sun was at liberty to do its thing in the shank of the
evening. About a hundred miles due west, the then smallish cities of
Dallas and Fort Worth were producing just enough pollution in the vast
western skies to aid and abet the evening sun in a profligate
paintbrushing of the heavens.
There were towering thunderheads, wispy mares' tails, buttermilk skies,
occasionally heavy cloud banks that hugged the horizon, and a
kaleidoscopic combination of all of these. The colors were pink, purple,
lavender, orange, gold, yellow, and red. Mostly red.
The sunsets were glorious. Incredible. Fantastic. Breathtaking. Beautiful.
Lovely.
In our family of four, any member, either my mother or my daddy or my
older brother or I, felt complete freedom, if not moral compunction, to
call everybody else to come out and watch the sunset. We did it often.
There was something restorational, healing, curative, blessed about
standing there still and quiet for a while in the blazing color of those
wonderful sunsets.
The experience brought a moment of magic to some pretty tough times. It
drew our family together. It bonded my brother and me with the glue of
geography and place and time that could be the stickiest stuff in the
world. It overshadowed the economic depression and made us forget for a
little while that the car had to be sold, that cotton was going in town
for 50 dollars a 500-pound bale, that there was no money for garden seed,
that there would be no new bicycles, that the mortgage payment on the farm
inexorably was coming due, that Herbert Hoover was President, and that the
quintessential Fundamentalist Frank Norris was charging regularly in his
paper, which we took, that George Truett was a Modernist.
After what is now well over half a century, I remember the sunsets. I
think of them a good deal more clearly and a great deal more happily than
I do of the hard times.
In our present situation characterized by Paul's "fears within and
fightings without," I propose to be still and know that there is God. I
propose to remember who I am and whose I am. I propose to remember my
calling from God in Christ Jesus. I propose to relish the challenge of
change. I propose to work for "the night is coming." I propose to
experience the bonding of geography and a place and time with my own kind
of folks. I propose to remember that a man's life consists not in the
abundance of the things that he possesses. I propose to think on those
things that are lovely.
And I propose to watch the sunsets. I hear tell that once a day God still
fixes one of them up for his kind of folks who are out there and looking.
Updated
Thursday, July 08, 2004
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