The Sunday Letter | Blessed South

I had an early meeting this week, the kind that puts you on the road not long after daybreak, about a half hour’s drive from the house. That part is nothing new. But this one was being held in a big public place I thought Misti might enjoy, so before I left I asked her, on something close to a whim, if she wanted to ride along. She said yes.

So we made the drive south together in the early morning, the two of us, the day just barely started. There were clouds low over everything when we set out, the soft kind you get just after first light, and as we drove the sun began to work its way through them, a little at a time, laying that first gold down across the fields and the road ahead. It was a beautiful morning. Nothing dramatic about it. Just the ordinary glory of a Southern daybreak, handed to us for free.

And here is the thing I keep turning over. Nothing happened. I could not tell you a single thing we talked about on that drive. We did not settle any big questions or lay out any grand plans for the future. Nothing marvelous took place. We did not pass one unusual thing the whole way down. By every measure a person might use to call a morning memorable, that morning had nothing whatsoever to show for itself.

And it was one of the best mornings I have had in a good while. Because the good of it was never going to come from an outcome. There was no result to it, no accomplishment, nothing to report back. There was only the dawning of a new day in a beautiful corner of God’s creation, and the quiet company of somebody I have loved for years and somehow still find fascinating. That was the whole of it, and it turned out that was everything.

I think we get that backward more often than not. We save our attention for the big days, the milestones and the trips and the occasions we circle on the calendar, and we treat the ordinary drive as something to get through on the way to something better. But most of a life is ordinary drives. If the only mornings that count are the remarkable ones, then most mornings do not count, and that is a sad and untrue way to go through your days. The plain ones are not the filler between the good parts. A great many of them, if you are paying attention, are the good part.

This is the season for noticing it, too, when the whole South starts taking to the roads just to see what the light is doing to the trees. Some folks will point the car toward the mountains and the big scenic drives, and that is a fine thing to do. But you do not have to go hunting a famous overlook to catch it. The same gift is sitting right there on your plain thirty-minute commute, in the sun coming up over an ordinary road, if you will only notice it is there.

So here is the small thing I would leave you with this week. The next time you have a drive to make, an errand to run, a plain early morning to get through, see if there is somebody you love who might come along for no reason at all. Do not plan anything. Do not expect anything. Just go, and be there for it, and let the ordinary morning be exactly as ordinary as it is. You may find, as I did, that you took the whole thing for granted and felt deeply blessed by it at the very same time, and that those two things sit a lot closer together than they sound.

Take a minute with that today. Then go take an ordinary drive with somebody you love, and try not to let a single thing happen.

That’s the week. See you next Sunday.

The South, Shared.

Porch Light

A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South

The sun came up again this morning. It will come up again tomorrow, and the morning after that, and every morning after that one, the same way it has risen on every soul who ever lived. You would think that after all this time God might be a little bored with it.

I have come to believe He is not, and the thought has changed how I see a plain morning. I suspect the reason the sun comes up the same way every day is not that God has run clean out of ideas, but that He never tires of the one He had. You know how a small child on your knee will laugh at the same little bounce and say do it again, and again, and again, with the delight never once wearing thin? I think the daily sunrise is closer to that than to a machine grinding out another turn. The sameness we shrug off as ordinary may be the very place God is the most glad.

“This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” — Psalm 118:24

Made. Not allowed, not tolerated, not permitted to happen again out of habit. Made, this day, the plain one with nothing on its calendar, put together on purpose by a God who was genuinely pleased to make it. And the verse does not ask us to admire the day from a polite distance. It says rejoice, be glad, get in on the gladness He already has about this ordinary morning. We file our big days under celebration and our plain ones under endurance. Heaven, as near as I can tell, does not sort them that way at all.

For a long time I was hard to impress about it. I have watched ten thousand sunrises, most of them through a windshield and half of them with my mind somewhere else entirely, treating the light coming up as nothing more than the backdrop to wherever I was hurrying off to. But the older I get, the more I would rather stop and watch one, for no reason at all, on the way to nothing, just for the plain joy of the thing. A morning like the one I had this week is what reminds me why. What I spent all those years driving past without a second glance is the very thing the God of all things keeps leaning over and doing again on purpose, because He still loves it.

So here is the invitation, and for once it is a purely happy one. Do not hold your gladness back for a remarkable day. Spend it on this one, the ordinary one He made this morning and will make again tomorrow with the same undimmed delight. The light He keeps setting over your plain road is not a rut He is stuck in. It is a gift He keeps choosing. It is on tonight, and it is on for you.

And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.