'God Fills Daybreak With Himself'
God does, indeed, fill daybreak with Himself. I learned that over Memorial Day weekend of 1997 – 20 years ago this weekend.
Working in the secular world back then, I found myself representing my employer – Tracker Marine (the boat company founded by Johnny Morris and Bass Pro Shops) at Callville Bay Marina on the north side of Lake Meade, near Las Vegas, Nev.
Tracker was the official boat sponsor of a tournament circuit that scheduled a Memorial Day Weekend event on Lake Meade, and I was there to talk boats and bass fishing with anyone … everyone … who was interested.
The first morning, I made the roughly 30-minute drive from my motel near Hoover Dam to Callville Bay for the day’s takeoff. I remember having a hard time focusing on the road that morning – not because it was so early; no, the incredible, star-filled desert sky mesmerized me.
Since I didn’t know the area well and wasn’t sure how long it would take, I ended up arriving at the marina close to an hour before the first boat headed out for the day’s fishing competition. What a blessing that turned out to be.
In those minutes with nothing going on, the quiet of the desert wrapping itself around everything, I witnessed the transformation of Nevada night into new day. What I experienced all around me literally reduced me to tears.
No words can describe the beauty – the pure awesomeness – of that time. Almost imperceptibly to the east, indigo began to lighten just a bit on the horizon; then a bit more, and a bit more.
The darkness seemed to want to hold on … as if struggling mightily with the inevitability of the light’s power. Myriad shades of night sky ultimately gave way to the first hint of blaze orange lighting the horizon and creeping ever upward. Overhead, however, stars continued to blaze, their background lightening by the minute until the faintest among them began disappearing.
There came a point at which night no longer could sustain itself. The orange-red-yellow made its way across the entire sky until, back in the east at a certain spot, a pinpoint of sun poked above the horizon.
It became a sliver, then a slice … never stopping; just fully climbing above the horizon as the day’s official sunrise.
By the time the last boats had headed off into the main lake – some of them beginning a run of more than 70 miles one way into the Grand Canyon where the anglers they carried just knew some big bass were waiting – what would become almost-unbearable heat was already announcing its arrival.
When the boats returned at 2:30 p.m. and anglers began officially weighing their fish, the marina’s in-the-shade thermometer read 118.
There was nothing to suggest the glorious beauty that had unfolded several hours earlier across a rugged, seemingly barren landscape as the night before surrendered to the day to come.
For all these years, I had a tough time finding words to explain why that morning proved so powerful to me – until last month, when poet Philip C. Kolin sent a copy of “Benedict’s Daughter,” a collection of poems he’s had published by Resource, an imprint of Wopf and Stock Publishers.
Kolin devotes the Prologue to the Liturgy of the Hours. Its first poem is called “Day Opens,” and he concludes with the statement that serves as this column’s headline: “God fills daybreak with himself.”
Thank you, Lord, for showing me along the shore of a desert lake.
