Up the Sunbeam

-- The forest floor wears a shaggy green carpet over fragrant black earth. Recent rain leaves everything feeling spongy underfoot and the spring in my step comes easy. The air is rinsed clean and cool, and I breathe it in greedily, knowing summer smog is not far off when I'll try to breathe shallow to avoid the smelly fumes that make my head feel squeezed too tight.  I step slow, eyes ever scanning, hunting rectangles, always framing the rectangles. There's one! Just at my feet, a single leaf stands out among all the others. There among countless green leaves, grows one impossible-to-ignore leaf arrayed in shades of sunset.  It blushes beautiful, setting its graceful shape in vivid contrast to so much green.  How brightly it stands out! God sees you like that. You stand out to him . . . all the time. When you think you're lost in a sea of city, surrounded by too many people  . . . When you're afraid of  being unimportant and undistinguished . . . Wh...

"For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground;" Isaiah 44:3 (NIV)   A dry and thirsty land . . . This time of year in California, all the grasses that looked like emerald velvet in February, turn a dusty gold, toasted to a dry crisp in the relentless sun. It has its own beauty, especially when contrasted with the deep green of the majestic oaks that grace the hillsides, but it is very dry. Yesterday my family and I went for a hike (my idea) on an unfamiliar trail at the height of the afternoon sun, and I paid dearly for it. I am very sensitive to the heat, and I was unprepared for the sustained climb of this particular trail or the heat of the day and I wound up with a throbbing headache I have yet to completely shake loose. I got to thinking about how thirsty I was up there, how dry and hot and dusty I felt. My desperation for water and cool shade was so intense, I could not go further without respite from the scorching sun above. I finally ...