Early each morning, the deep blackness of the eastern sky begins to lighten. The stars wink out one by one until a palette of blues, yellows, and oranges spreads across the sky. The sun lifts itself above the mountains, casting its warming rays across the cold landscape. Throughout the day the sun moves across the sky–slowly, but still quickly enough that I can almost perceive the movement of the shadows. After work, I drive home toward the mountains. The blues and oranges have reappeared, with the brighter planets of Venus and Jupiter just beginning to be visible. The darkness returns, but I know the brightness of the morning will come again.

Each winter the onset of cold, ice, and shortened days is soothed by warming food, crackling fires, and time with family and friends. January and February leave holiday spirits behind and slog forward through slush and landscapes of grim gray sky seen through the skeletons of trees. Then finally, the weeks of March and April reveal life beneath the soil. Ice melts, trees bud, and slowly the mountains change from austere gray to golden and green.

Every morning and evening the sun rises and sets a bit farther to the north. Days grow longer and warmer. We plant our gardens and wait in eager anticipation as seed after seed breaks through to new life. We resurrect our lawnmowers and begin our weekly ritual. The strawberry plants that survived the cold begin to flower and attract bees. Once the berries are ripe, we walk outside barefoot and pick a few, dust off the dirt and eat them warm, savoring the first flavors of summer.

One day the sun pauses in its northward journey, then begins moving toward the south. Days shorten, but the heat of summer doesn’t slacken quite yet. Wild raspberries and blackberries ripen, and so we spend hours fighting insects, birds, and thorns for cobbler and a few quarts in the freezer. We finally begin harvesting from our gardens and start filling our canning shelves.

September and October bring relief from the summer heat, but in just a few weeks the frost colors the leaves, then brings them to the ground in dry, dead heaps. The blue skies of October soon give way to gray and ice. Another year is gone.

---

My first memory is of traveling in a Ford van to my great-grandfather’s funeral in Kansas. I don’t remember the funeral, but I do remember crawling around under the seats on the faded red carpet. It was summer, and the warmth and the tight spaces under the seats felt safe and comforting.

Childhood passed with years filled by school days and friends. I spent winters in a classroom as part of a tidy row of desks. Summer brought freedom from assignments and the need to sit still. During those warm days I walked and ran through the forest behind my dad’s chicken houses, discovering new trails and seeing if I could lose myself in its green embrace. Once the trees began dropping their leaves, I would sit under them for hours with my .22 rifle, waiting for a flick of a tail or a sound among the treetops to reveal my prey. My dad said that real marksmen shot squirrels in the head to spare the meat, so I waited until the squirrel paused for a moment, its head framed in my scope, before I carefully squeezed the trigger.

My understanding grew with my self-consciousness as I entered my teens. It was a time of both excitement and melancholy as I maneuvered my way among relationships and expectations. Bad company and bad choices dismantled my innocence and tragedy showed me life was not certain. I realized my need of salvation and was baptized, but like many other young men, I struggled to fully sacrifice my fleshly desires for the cause of Christ.

A decade later, my first child is born. Small and helpless, yet full of promise. Months of spring and summer pass. He is growing so slowly that I often can’t perceive it. Then one day, he crawls, a bit later he walks, now he has a will and personality. Every change brings new joys and challenges.

I dimly remember some of the same things he is now experiencing: birthday parties with cousins and friends, discovering the world of books, trying and failing to sit still during church. Now he is in school, making new friends and following the examples of others. His world will expand until it takes in much more than me, and the strength of my influence begins to fade.

The only time I ever saw my great-grandfather was in a casket during that hot Kansas summer. He was the son of immigrants who fled Tsarist Russia in the 1870s to escape military conscription. They came to the unsettled American plains under the Homestead Act to pull a living from the soil. During his ninety-nine years he lived through two world wars, the Depression, man landing on the moon, and the death of his wife following the birth of twin boys, his fifteenth and sixteenth children. His faith and life experiences indelibly affected the lives of his children, who then passed part of that on to their children and grandchildren. I never saw my great grandfather alive, but I still feel the effects of his choices today. His children carried part of him forward into a future he could never visit.

---

Day bleeds into day, season into season, and year into year. We are each part of small yet vast story encompassing ourselves, our ancestors, and our descendants. Each generation makes mistakes, learns, and tries to leave a better world for those who follow. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don’t. The blessings of belief are precarious because each generation connects the past to the future in an ongoing history of faith and failure. We need strength and wisdom to move forward in confidence toward a new morning for ourselves and those who follow us.