Morning sun on Winter's snow

A good thought penetrated into my sleepy head yesterday morning.

It was such a beautiful morning, with piercing blue sky and the type of icy snow that looks like glitter in the sunlight. Inside we were trying to eat breakfast without being blinded by the brightness, no one really wanting to close the shades. We ended up shading our eyes with our hands over our eggs and toast, peeking through our fingers to see each other, while enjoying the warmth of the sun through the south windows. After breakfast, 8-year-old Essie and I rested our foreheads against the freezing cold windows to feel the red glow of the sun even through our closed eyes, laughing about how the hot sun could get through that sub-zero air outside. Out of all that, I ended up with these words while alone with the laundry...

     Morning sun on Winter's snow,
          so bright it hurts the eyes ~
               hinting of Glory so radiant we need new eyes to see.

After the fact, I thought about C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Prince Caspian and crew are nearing The Very End of the World, strengthened by the sweet water of the sea in the Utter East.

And one by one everybody on board drank. And for a long time they were all silent. They felt almost too well and strong to bear it: and presently they began to notice another result. As I have said before, there had been too much light...the sun too large (but not too hot), the sea too bright, the air too shining. Now the light grew no less – if anything, it increased – but they could bear it. They could look straight up at the sun without blinking. They could see more light than they had ever seen before. And the deck and the sail and their own faces and bodies became brighter and brighter and every rope shone. And next morning when the sun rose, now five or six times its old size, they stared hard into it...Every day and every hour the light became more brilliant and still they could bear it. No one ate or slept and no one wanted to, but they drew buckets of dazzling water from the sea, stronger than wine and somehow wetter, more liquid, than ordinary water... And one or two of the sailors who had been oldish men when the voyage began now grew younger every day. 

So today, another bright morning, I find myself wondering which verses C.S. Lewis had absorbed to write a story which so fills us with longing for the new heaven and the new earth. Thinking to find a few verses this morning with trite and easy application, a quick concordance search of the words glory, light, bright, shining, eyes, and resurrection produced literally thousands of verses to review. That should keep me busy in my spare moments for some time to come.

                                                        ~Sara~

"Lord, open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law!" (Psalm 119:18)