The sky looks melancholy and sad today, marbled with grays and white, a few dashes of blue. The clouds are gathering, their bellies gray, contemplating dropping rain, but the breezes are pushing them north. No matter how blue our skies are we know dark clouds will eventually come. We’ll weather these storms and look for rainbows on the horizon.

We need the occasional storms to billow up in our calm blue skies to help us appreciate our blessings. Clouds color our experiences in life. When the sky is exceptional in its beauty, maybe God is talking to us, painting the sky with his grace and love. When he sends the frightful storms, we know when they pass, he will light the day again with the sun’s warmth and send a rainbow to dress the heavens. Romans 15:13 states, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

The good Lord blessed us with some rain last night. It’s cool and pleasant on the porch this morning. My yard is full of songbirds and the ever present yellow cloudless sulfur butterflies. I was pulling off the dead petunia blooms when a chocolate colored silver spotted skipper landed on a petunia bloom. Their name intrigues me. The breeze is producing a wondrous soft wind chime symphony, quiet enough to accompany the songbirds’ morning hymns. “The earth has its music for those who will listen,” George Santayana. There’s so much of nature’s music in my yard this morning I’m reminded of a thought about heaven from Mark Twain. He said said if everyone in heaven was flapping their wings and plucking their harps it would be such a ruckus you would hear it on earth. I love that! Don’t think I could flap fast enough to keep my chubby self in the air! And I’d rather play my trumpet than pluck a harp’s strings. Maybe we can choose an instrument in heaven’s orchestra and make “a joyful noise.” Psalm 100 states, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing.”

I love the sky in the daytime. Each day Mother Nature and Father Sky compare notes and decided how to color the day, getting down to business with God’s permission, coloring the heavens above us. Every day is different and I love the wonder of that. I love the bright azure blue of the fall sky when its full of bleached white clouds. I love to watch the thunderstorm clouds boil up in their angry purples and blues and overflow with rain. When we feel the wind of a storm, maybe we are feeling the sky brush across our cheeks.

I know the night sky will follow the day’s sky. I love the night sky, too. I watch for Father Sky to pin the twinkling stars and hang his luminous moon in the purple canopy of the darkness. When I gaze up at the night sky I feel a sense of how tiny we are in the universe. I sometimes think of the wise men following the bright star to kneel by baby Jesus. There is beauty and hope in the night sky. John Keats wrote, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The night sky is a thing of glorious beauty in its quiet darkness. I marvel that the stars always shine in partnership with the moon but are hidden by the sun’s bright light. I never thought about the stars always shining even in the day’s light. The daytime sky would be black like night and the sun bright like a spotlight if the Earth had no atmosphere.

My street doesn’t have much color in the trees yet but I’ve noticed the maples, and hickories, and chokeberries have started to color up. My neighborhood has huge water oaks and their changing yellow leaves look like blotches of sunshine here and there amongst the green leaves. The dogwoods across the street were the first to put on their scarlet hues. I miss the huge sweetgum tree on my driveway in Alexander City. That tree was so beautiful, flaunting itself in the fall, painted in yellows and oranges and purples and reds. The leaves looked like Mother Nature just dipped her brush in all the shades of her artist’s palette and let the colors bleed together on the leaves’ canvases. I loved putting branches of sweetgums in vases on the dinner table. And can’t forget the beautiful little Japanese maple in my front yard. When she put on her crimson ball gown, and the sun filtered down through her branches, she was the most beautiful belle in the yard.

“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.” — Vincent Van Gogh