photo by Jon Heller

If there is one thing I love, it is the bush sky. Lately I’ve been haunted by my memories of it…of standing beneath the mountain in one of the remote villages of Kabara. It swallows me. I remember staring up at the mountain, listening to the sounds of the village echo across the sky and gently fade as the night descended. I remember the deepness of the dark…the sheer heaviness of its quiet as the drums faded from the village and left nothing in its place. Nothing. The night is so very deep. I have returned here in my mind so often these past weeks as my heart feels the weight of just too much dark. I have cried countless nights; helpless, hopeless. “I lift up my eyes to the hills…Where does my help come from?” I have often found peace and solace when I retreat to the things of the soil, of the air…the things that breathe with the rhythm of my Creator. But even the hills are dark and silent lately, and my mama’s heart doesn’t know where to turn.

The thing about the bush sky is that because it is so very dark, the stars are absolutely incredible. They feel like stardust softly falling on your skin. They paint the entire sky. All of it. The whole expanse as far as you can see. I remember staring up at the black, star-sprinkled sky under the mountain that night so many years ago and just breathing deep.  The beauty of the Creator is just endless, and out there in that absolute stillness I could have drowned in it… And that’s when the lightning started. It crept through the silence, splashing above the savanna grasses, curling around treetops, illuminating and darkening the horizon. As it flashed across the sky, bursting behind massive clouds and turning their outlines a brilliant silver, I saw my Creator’s face. It was barely a moment, but it stole my breath and there was no doubt in my mind what I had just seen. All of the power and majesty of the living God, visiting me in the stillness. 

Today my mind revisits that place, but I am drowning in the sorrow I have brought with me. The sorrow that feels so endless and so dark and so desperately without answers… How I yearn to truly return there, to the dark of that mountain village, to the beauty of the stars, to the certainty of His presence. I am overwhelmed with my fear. Yet in these moments where I can barely breathe between my tears, I lift my eyes to the hills. Again and again I lift them. To the Maker of heaven and of earth. And each time He reminds me that He showed me His face in the quiet of a lightning storm. And that I have only to be still.