Before the Dawn

I knew we were facing the ocean.

When we arrived after 10:00 pm and looked out from the balcony, the white foam of the waves hitting the shoreline were visible in the darkness. The other evidence there was an ocean out there besides the blackness was of course the noise. It was no sound machine! It was the consistence of millions of gallons of water crashing, marching forth with certainty and then abruptly halting just where the Creator said, "you can only come this far..."

"Yes, Me, who made the shorelines to contain the ocean waters. I drew a line in the sand that cannot be crossed. Waves roll in but cannot get through; breakers crash but that's the end of them." Jeremiah 5:22

Waking up in a foreign land is certainly familiar, but no matter how many times I wake up a stranger in a strange land, there are still the moments of morning where I wonder, "what time is it, is it time to get up yet? (often it is the middle of the night at my physical location, but midday inside my jet lagged physique.)

Although I am in the same time zone as the one I reside in - this morning my mind filled with the same thoughts. It is dark outside and I still couldn't tell the time by the lack of light. I consulted my watch to discover it was almost 7:00 am. "Where is the sun? Is my clock wrong? Was I fooling myself about the time zone? What's up besides me?" (The sun surely was still somewhere on siesta!)

As I made my morning adjustments, slowly and surely (as it complies each and everyday) the dawn began to dispel the darkness. At first, as I looked out across the horizon, the sea still blended into the sky - an unbroken but immense vista. I prayed, I praised, and I kept watching. Over the course of the next 15 minutes, as the sun came up over the Sierra Madras, the sea began to sparkle, what was once a blurred and indistinguishable view, separated, sea, sky, distance in the hills, and movements from miniature people enjoying the majesty of the mighty ocean.

I was breathless. The life we are all finding ourselves in the middle of is "Before the Dawn." Before the day of the coming of the King. The day when we see Him in the clouds and just like this dawn, revealing the beauty of His creation,


I expect I will be breathless.