The sun and I play a little game although there is a slight possibility he is not aware of it.
When I’m up before he is, I figure, “I’ve got this whole day in front of me with lots of time and sunlight.” It’s like when you got a quarter (ten dollars for today’s kids) as a child and you’d walk into a candy store and think you had all the money in the world.
But when the sun does rise, the clock starts ticking down and seems to speed up and before I know it, I’m trying to get all chores down before the sun sets.
And so it was in the garden one night. The sweat on my brow was intense from trying to squeeze in just a little more tilling and digging before daylight ran out. The orange glow meant the sun was about to go to bed and I thought I heard him say, “You should, too!”
I turned my tractor lights on the garden. It dawned on me that some of the
perimeter work needed a chain saw and nothing less. It is not smart to use the chain saw in the dark. I relented to the sun’s earlier advice and went to bed.
It went from the ridiculous to the sublime as I thought, “What work would be so critical as to sweat into the night in a garden?”
PORTAL TO HEAVEN: God uses ironies and however-thin and comical correlations as a metaphor-du-jour to push us toward profound portals to heaven.
Then Jesus went with them to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and he said, ‘Sit here while I go over there to pray.’…Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.’ And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.
Matthew 26:36,38, Luke 22:44 NIV