A late night stroll down the airport runway.

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 "God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers, and clouds and stars." - Martin Luther

I have always been someone that connects with God through the beauty of God's creation.

I regularly try to retreat into nature, but in recent years, these moments have been few and far between.

No matter how busy we are and how much noise we fill our lives with, sometimes we are unexpectedly forced into situations where we will hear God's voice loudly and clearly as if spoken through a megaphone.

Last Friday, I experienced one of these special occasions. 

I was attending an art exhibition in Bethlehem with my wife and child. It was held in an airplane hangar at our local airport. While I am certainly not an art connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination, I thoroughly enjoyed walking through the exhibit, appreciating the beautiful paintings and the emotional responses that they brought up within me.

Due to the late opening of the exhibition, a short while after being there, our 11-month-old daughter started getting miserable. This is understandable as it was well past her usual bedtime.

She has always been a difficult sleeper (she has serious FOMO like her dad) so I decided to take her for a walk in her pram to try and coerce her to sleep. 

So it was there on Friday night at 9pm that I found myself walking up and down the runway of Bethlehem Airport, praying that there were no late night flights scheduled to land.

One of the benefits of living in a small town is that one is able to fully experience the beauty of a starry night sky, without the pollution of nearby city lights. Walking back and forth on the runway, staring at the beautiful night sky full of stars, I was suddenly teleported to a different world. A place where I was reminded of the immensity and great mysteries of God. A place where I was filled with God's peace and enveloped in Her love.

Sometimes, when we get so busy that we forget to withdraw to the places where we connect most intimately with the Divine, God provides a way.

"Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing". - Isaiah 40:26 

Image Source: Lubo Minar


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