A glimpse of beauty

It's 4 AM and I can't sleep, so this is what you get
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I drove with a fellow youth minister (back when I was one myself) from Minnesota to Wisconsin for a ministers retreat. We left at sunrise and the fog was dense. You could hardly tell it was sunrise. He was driving and I was quiet.

It gets quite hilly on either side of the St. Croix River, which is the state line. The hills were full of trees whose Autumn leaves had lost their vibrance and were losing their grip, falling one by one through the fog onto the cold ground. Up and down the hills we journeyed, around the curves, slowly. Shivering children awaited their coming school busses as they stood next to their mailboxes out on those lonely country roads. Everything was dark gray and dreary, like the earth was smudged with soot.

The weather matched my mood, a brooding melancholy that doesn't sleep well at night and hates being awake in the day. After several silent minutes, a blinking light, strobing ahead of us in the road broke a little hole in the dreariness. It was mysterious and somewhat welcomed.

" What is that light?" I asked my friend.

"It's the fog light on a school bus. You can't see the bus in the fog and that's why they put these strobing lights on them. I guess they work." My friend the youth minister was also a part-time bus driver for the local school district because his church didn't pay him squat. He took the day off from driving the bus to go to this retreat.

"Oh," I replied with as little energy as possible. Mystery solved; back to the dreariness. I guess it was 't enough light for me. We kept driving.

Conversation did pick up a little, though it seemed like the sun was stuck just below the horizon and buried in fog. It just didn't get any lighter. The fog, the tall trees, the hills - everything kept us from the sun. We griped about our lousy pay, parents who wouldn't cooperate, teens who didn't care. Talking didn't really help.

Then something seemed just a little bit different, enough to catch our attention. Finally, it appeared to be getting a little brighter. The fog turned from deep gray to a thick and hazy, deep orange, but still quite dark. We were both glad that the sun looked like it was preparing to finally make an appearance.

"Maybe it'll burn off this fog and we can make some good time," I said.

"Yeah, that would be nice," my friend replied.

We kept talking and griping at a little faster clip this time, getting into detailed gripes when WHAM! We were struck speechless.

We crested a tall hill and completely burst free from the fog into a brilliant orange sunlight. The morning sky above our heads was completely clear and the last star had just faded away in the light. We were above the fog. The sun was positioned straight ahead of us half emerged from the horizon, lighting up the top of the fog with a blazen orange as far as the eye could see in every direction. Though you're not supposed to look at the sun, we couldn't help ourselves. Words were totally inappropriate - only sounds of amazement and wonder.

We started back down the hill and plunged down into the fog, so deep that it was dark gray and dreary once again. We never crested another hill tall enough to see the sun, but for every next hill we had hope. We would wonder if there was a chance to see it again. We talked about the beauty we saw. We must have said, "I've never seen anything like it" a dozen times.

It was unforgettable. And what was forgettable, was forgotten.