Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends,

There’s that moment in the evening. The moment just when the sun takes its final course just over the horizon. It’s that moment when you see just what the sky will look like as the day closes. In Tucson we’re blessed with some magnificent sunsets. Breathtaking at times and proving the artistry of the Creator we see emblazoned God’s own signature - as if he’s finished the day’s work and signing it with a flourish that takes the breath away.

Sometimes I catch sight of that moment while taking out the trash. We have a long driveway so taking out the trash is something of a hike. Yet I often find that it’s during that most mundane of domestic duties that I get a reminder of the utterly disarming love of God. I imagine the hundred or thousand or hundreds of thousands of people going about the work of domestic tranquility under the radiant signature of God.

I pray that they’ll stop and pause and wonder. I pray they will hold the moment in their heart and be still and know that even as we all labor mightily in all the ways we do day by day - for bread or breath, for love’s sake, for the last time or for the first, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad - all those labors and so many more happen beneath the canopy of God’s mercy and loving kindness.

Imagine if everyone, around the whole of creation, simply paused together to give thanks in whatever tongue and in whatever way they could at the close of each day. Imagine a world that remembered to get caught up in the wonder of it all so that the fevers of the day might cool.

It’s so easy to feel alone amidst the changes and chances of life - to feel that we labor and even to wonder to what end. Yet there it is, every night for millennium upon millennium before us and after us, there is God’s love. There is God at the throne of grace signing off on another day’s work. There is God giving us reason to pause, to wonder, and to pray.

Robert

Sunset from our back yard Saturday evening.