Morning
That song, an old hymn made popular in the 70’s, is running through my mind, “Morning is Breaking.”
We do not often think of the words morning and breaking together, and yet the two do belong together. The sun comes up at dawn to create a division, a split, between two very different parts of the twenty-four hours each of us are given. We go from darkness to light in dramatic fashion at daybreak.
This break, the division between darkness and daylight, speaks of the hope, the promise, the freshness that is ours each new day.
The painting that I have included in this post is called “Dancing with Dawn.” I purchased this painting as a retirement gift to myself. Looking forward to all the days where I hoped to sleep in, I jokingly said this would be the only depiction of dawn that I would see after I retired.
There were those mornings where I leisurely read my newspapers while I sipped my coffee, or I frittered away the morning by scrolling through Facebook, or Instagram, or I read blogs. Then the morning would be gone, and I would feel as if the day were wasted.
Mornings are a gift not to be wasted. I think of the artist that created this glorious rendition of daybreak. He did not fritter away the morning. He had to have gotten up very early to go to this spot, a spot I know well, to set up his easel in preparation for painting. His time of creating a thing of beauty was best done in light of early morning. The name of the painting denotes how he approached morning. He said he was dancing with dawn.
The two artists I am thinking of today, the writer of the hymn “Morning is Breaking,” and the painter of my “Dancing with Dawn,” both saw morning as a time to be fully awake, a time not to be missed, a time to create.
Each morning is a first. It is a time of newness. There is a break between the old things of yesterday, and newness of the day before us each morning. Each morning brings us a reminder that God’s mercies are new every morning.
There a sense of the holiness of each new day when one arises early in the morning to see the day break. As the song says, mornings are “God’s re-creation of the first day.”
