"Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you. The man who walks in the dark does not know where he is going. Put your trust in the light while you have it, so that you may become sons of light." Jesus: John 12:15-16

I am often taken with the power of early morning to lift my spirits and appropriately frame my day. Today I got going both earlier and later than usual: Earlier to make coffee for Rebekah (as she needed to get up and prepare for a retreat she is leading) and later because I waited to walk Scout until after she had left.

Consequently I enjoyed a different view of the world as it emerged from the night's rest. The air was cool enough to coax a little thin mist from the ground, and our garden was gently back-lit as I meandered up our drive.

So I came back out with my camera to record the moment and to employ the image to jump-start both my praying and my thinking this morning.

Hopefully - and this is my long-term goal - my prayer and my thought will become barely distinguishable as I learn what it means to "pray without ceasing"; prayer not separate from myself but prayer integrated into myself, so that my thoughts are subsumed into the ongoing creative processes of God... If, indeed, God actually thinks - or does God simply emanate divine being?

Is the creative urgency of God limited by something as distinctively cerebral as thought, or does God by definition transcend such discrete activity? Of course, God is not restricted in terms of scope; nor is the Great I AM prevented by unbounded divinity from limiting the parameters of his being should it please his purposes...

Yet what I do understand, and with increasing clarity, is that God desires to enter into communion with me to the extent that I can grasp; and that God intends to expand the limits of what I now grasp to include a future virtually unimaginable today. My responsibility - my opportunity - is to simply follow Jesus, and to trust, and to always enter each day guided by the light.

It's just as well I'm still so young (!!!) because I sense there is a long road yet to journey.

Blessings, always - DEREK