Across the road south of the house is a woods wrapped over a hill. Every morning I pull back the curtain and look out my window into that woods.
Some mornings in winter it looks like an army of brown pencils standing sentinel. For a few mornings in spring it is carpeted with Trillium or purple wildflowers. Some mornings it is snowy as Narnia. Through the summertime from mid May to late August it is dark and cool and green. In early October it blushes with color and then late in the month it turns bright yellow and red and gold and orange and flames with glorious hues that draw me like a powerful magnet in my soul. In November it is muted gold and brown and finally gray pencils again.
This morning a bright shaft of sunlight beams at an angle down to the forest floor and reminds me of the power of contemplating the glories of God in the things he created.
I remind myself never to speed past blue water and sparkling sunlight. Never ignore the antics of songbirds, or the banter of children, or the music or water over rocks or the heart-pounding rumble of thunder and the arresting flash of lightning or the charming little lights hovering over the meadow when fireflies are courting on a summer evening. Never allow your soul to be deadened to wonder and the beauty around you but let it ever draw your very soul upward to God.
“Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” ? C.S.
P.S. The Japanese have a word for sunlight filtered by trees. https://www.awatrees.com/2017/02/16/komorebi-sunshine-through-trees
(Our home on Rutledge Road in the early ’90’s)
These are just a very few seconds long and are from last spring near the NWHS pond. A storm was moving in and I sat in the car observing the behavior of the Canada geese. There were several large families and, as the rain began and the wind picked up, they all got off the shore and swam into the center of the pond, and then lined up so that they each – even the young ones – were facing the direction from which the storm was coming. 
In the morning (as I write this) Lois and I will leave for Holmes County, Ohio to celebrate forty years of marriage. Sunday night we drove down to Camp Selah to give testimony four decade of the goodness faithfulness of God to us. Tonight I’m gathering my thoughts out on the east-facing porch enjoying the quietness, the crickets, and a soft breeze in the golden hour and thinking about you all, Bethel, my parish. 
Our lives matter more than we think. We are more influential than we imagine. Even if we were to try to live isolated lives, our lives touch so many other lives in so many ways. Only looking back from the perspective of eternity will we see the full wonder of it, I think. In beautiful prose Wendell Berry wrote of this in one of his earliest books about a small house he rebuilt and lived in for a time on the banks of the Kentucky River:
“…But my encounter with them cast a new charm on my sense of the place. They made me realize that the geography of this patch of river bank takes in much of the geography of the world. It is under the influence of the arctic were the winter birds go in summer, and of the tropics, where the summer birds and go in winter. It is under the influence of forest and of croplands and strip mines in the Appalachians, and it feels the pull of the gulf of Mexico. 
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