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.
