When The Sun Doesn't Rise

I awoke early this morning to watch the sun rise over the mountains. 

Moving past my disorientation due to (and anger at) my alarm clock, I steeped a hot cup of tea, bundled up, and trudged outside in eager anticipation of a beautiful sunrise. 

But I didn't find what I was hoping for. It was, in fact, so overcast that the mountains themselves were not even visible.

As I sat in silence waiting, shivering in the early Colorado twilight, hoping that by some miracle the heavy cloak of fog would lift to reveal a spectacular sunrise, a realization slowly began to dawn. 

As I gazed at the snow-capped pines and the cold white flakes meandering through the air around me, I realized that it was growing light out. 

I did not see a sunrise, but the sun was rising nevertheless. 

The rest of the day I would walk in its light. It would give me sight. It would radiate warmth. It would bring life to the world around me.

I wanted a brilliant sunrise. I wanted to be dazzled by pinks and reds and diamonds lancing through the sky and glittering off the mountains in heart-wrenching splendor. I wanted all the beauty and brilliance my eyes could take in, but all I needed was light. 

All I needed was its presence. All I needed was for the sun to rise and to give life in its constancy. 

And it had.

Sometimes we behold no brilliant sunrise. 

But shrouded and obscured as it may seem to our desperately expectant eyes, dawn breaks. 

Light comes. 

And it is enough.