“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” Psalm 8:3-4 (KJV)

This past weekend, we have been told that a solar storm could potentially allow us in South Carolina to see a rare appearance of the Northern Lights. It is one of those phenomenon, that if I actually had a bucket list, I would have on mine – to go somewhere to view them in their fullest glory. So naturally, I was intrigued and hopeful that we would see them. I apparently had missed the information on Friday night and on Saturday night, I made frequent trips outside in the hopes I would see them. It got to the point that I dreamed that people were telling me to come outside and see the beautiful lights in shades of purple and green, but to no avail. At the end of Sunday evening, Mother’s Day, after a wonderful and happy day, I looked at my husband who said we had another chance to see them and I said, “That would be the last Mother’s Day gift for the day if I could see them. ” Later in the night, he went outside and came back in and said maybe tonight was the night. We set up two chairs in an open space of the driveway and observed the sky. We did not see the amazing green and purple lights, that appeared in the media. Instead, we saw faint cloud-looking formations that were the palest shades of aqua and turquoise with an occasional shimmer of pink.

We also saw an abundance of stars, shooting stars, and other lit objects going across the sky. Some were clearly airplanes, and others were too high and moving too quickly for us to determine what they were. Most of all, as we gazed up in the air, we were taken aback at the expanse of God’s creation, the multitude of stars and other celestial objects in the sky and the ever so faint formations that we determined were the best view of Northern Lights we would see. As we gazed up, we remembered the promise of to Abraham that his seed would be like the number of stars in the sky and that we are counted in that number. We had just studied Abraham earlier that day in our Church School. We remembered that in the expanse of time and space, God still took time to create us. We gazed, and in our own way, we expressed our own gratefulness and worship of the God who created everything and still took time to consider us. And as the formations stopped happening, and the night was getting late, we joked about how two old people spent the evening, sitting in chairs and star gazing. It was perhaps the sweetest way to end the day.