Morning Thanks--Dawn's own grace

I am, for better or for worse, among those who lay claim to the the theological legacy of John Calvin, not that I care to fight about it. Count me among those who believe---gulp!--in predestination. 

There I said it. I'm out of the closet. Now let me say it again: I think Calvin was right about the inscrutable sovereignty of God. 

But before we lay bare our fists, let me say that the truth of that much maligned doctrine can be forsworn only in a rear view mirror. That God chooses us makes sense only after the fact, not before, and certainly not about you or that gent down the street or the woman he married or didn't. That God does the heavy lifting in mission work doesn't mean we don't.

I have beloved Christian friends who think I'm stark raving mad to admit that, sweet saints who've been brought up to believe that what I've just said are fightin' words. 

I get that. One of my all-time favorite wise men, a thoughtful scamp named Rev. Leonard Verduin, used to say that salvation will forever be one of God's great mysteries. To say we have no free will like the predestinators do is to deny our own functioning humanity; but to say that our free will trumps God's will is the rant of idiots. Verduin told me he liked to think of grace as an escalator (think airports) constantly going up to the next floor, always in operation (heavenly escalators here, not the ones in O'Hare), always moving, always accessible, always lugging human being into grace.

But you got to get on the dumb thing. An escalator won't grab your bag or load you. You got to take a step yourself.  

I like that.

See the picture up top?--that's yesterday's dawn.

I sat down here correcting papers until seven, got up from the chair, wandered over to the picture window right here to my right, looked out, and saw--I'm practiced at dawns--that this Greenland-sized gray cloud was aimed like a battleship at the spot where the horizon was burning and that therefore what was going on outside my window was going to turn into something that was going to knock your socks off.  

All mornings are masterpieces--don't get me wrong. Dawn is always so much more than dawn. If you don't believe me, open Walden to its back pages sometime and listen to Thoreau.

But this one, I knew was going to be special, as they say, the colors not to be believed.

I was right. I got a pair of shoes on, threw on too light of a jacket, grabbed my camera, and drove like a banshee to a place where the horizon was open to the sky, where there was enough of a silo to create some frontispiece. Then, suddenly, and only momentarily, I was in a cartoon world.

I came back home, unloaded the goods and dropped four of them on Facebook. Not once in my years on FB did I get as many "likes." More than one hundred.  These shots are show-stoppers not because I painted the heavens but because yesterday's dawn, for which I'm thankful by the way, was one of those once-a-year specials. Grace was written in the heavens.

I got a digital remembrance or two because I was there. I saw it with my own camera. But that's it. I didn't do it. I didn't spring that battleship of a cloud, I didn't paint its underbelly scarlet, didn't do a darn thing. I was just there looking through a lens.

That dawn you see there belongs to the Lord.

That's the kind of Calvinist I am. See this?  That's what he done yesterday, just outside my window. 

That's grace, or at least something like it.