Look Toward Heaven

Observe everything that takes place in the sky — how the lights in the heavens do not change their courses, how each one rises and sets in order, each at its appointed time. None of them steps outside its assigned path. None hurries. None delays. Each transgresses nothing of the command that has been given to it.

Watch the moon as it fills and empties, month after month, without ever refusing its turn. Watch the sun rise each morning from the quarter of the sky in which it is expected. Watch the constellations wheel above the horizon in the same slow procession your grandparents watched and their grandparents before them. Nothing above you is improvising.

Look then at the earth, and give thought to the things that are done upon it, from the first to the last, and how none of the works of God alters as it becomes visible in its season.

Consider the summer and the winter — how the whole earth is filled with water and how the clouds, the dew and the rain rest upon it, each in its turn. The clouds do not withhold what they were sent to carry. The rain does not fall in the wrong month out of resentment. The dew arrives quietly each morning and does its work before anyone is awake to praise it.

Consider and see how all the trees appear withered and how they shed their leaves — except for fourteen trees which do not shed, which remain with their old foliage for two or three years until the new comes. Even the exception has a rule. Even what looks like an outlier has a place inside the pattern.

And again consider the days of summer, how the sun is above the earth and stands opposite it, while you seek shade and shelter because of the heat. The ground itself grows hot, and you cannot walk upon the earth or upon a rock because of the burning. The same earth that sheltered you in spring now demands that you take shelter from it. This too is order — not comfort, but order.