JB Jackson paints a sunset with words

God's Paintbrush


There's always a tiny window in my day that I see from the back porch. My back porch faces northwest, over miles of cattle pasture and sagebrush and giant rolls of hay. From my back porch, the sky is bigger than the land. I draw something - if nothing more than the comfort of the routine - from watching the sun set every night.

God's paintbrush, I think of it, when this enormous sky begins to transform to shades of orange and red and pink and violet. It makes me think of God as euphoric - as though He began a work and became so enamored of it that He didn't know when to stop. He became giddy and intoxicated with the possibilities of those colors and the unfathomable canvas of the sky.

Every night, at sunset, I creep out onto the back porch and try to get the same sense of abandon that God must surely feel from His own creative prowess.

Night doesn't fall in Wyoming; it crashes. Black and impenetrable, it always frightens me. Yet I'm compelled every night to watch this dazzling display of the sun in the final throes of death. It reminds me that I'm small and that the night is vastly more powerful than I am.

How oddly comforting my own smallness can be. Even if I were not here - even if I were lying lifeless in the sagebrush - God would still be twirling like a dervish with His paintbrush in the sky; the wind would be as icy; the opaque night would descend as thickly. O, Grave, where is thy victory?

jbjackson

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