When I got out of bed at 5:45, I looked out the back window and noticed a long, narrow strip of sunlight across the lawn.  It was perhaps 6-inches wide, and two dozen feet long.  It was made by the light of the rising sun coming in the north side of our east window and exiting through the south side of our west window.  The sun now rises (3 May) toward the north.  As the sun gets higher in the sky it moves south and makes an arc across the sky.

The rising of the sun and its movement toward the south made my narrow strip of light get progressively wider and shorter.  As the sun moved south, the band of light necessarily moved north.  After 45 minutes it became a perfect square that highlighted a clump of white daffodils with orange centers.  Very pretty.  The long, narrow band of light finished as a five-foot-wide, six-inch-long bar at the base of the daffodils.

The quaking aspens in the back yard are fully leafed out in their light-green spring finery.  Their normally-quaking leaves are perfectly still.

A quarter mile above the house, where the dirt of the recently-planted potato field joins the emerald-green of the wheat field there are a number of light-colored things that look like rocks where there shouldn't be rocks.  As I watch, I discover that the rocks move.  It is a flock of a dozen or so turkeys.  I'm glad to see that some made it through the winter.  They're all that's left of the 30 or so that were here last fall.

The sky above the house is clear and blue.  In the east there is a pile of unmoving clouds on the mountains.  A similar pile is building on the mountains to the west.  We'll probably have a day like yesterday that was intermittently sunny, warm, blustery, and rainy.

Everywhere I look I see magnificent vistas of mountains, trees, fields, sky, clouds, and our patchwork valley.  The greens are bright.  The blue sky is bright.  The white clouds are bright.  The yellow forsythia in the back yard is a light in itself.  The cherry trees are white clouds hugging the ground.

I can see forever.  I profoundly pity those who look out their window and only see the house next door.  I pity those in the southern or eastern areas of our country whose vision is limited by the thick vegetation that encloses them.  I pity those in the Midwest who have no mountains to interrupt their perfectly flat landscape.

My vantage point here on the hill opens the world to my view.  But even my view is limited compared to God's.  From where He stands, He probably pities me.  He looks upon the wide expanse of eternity.  Nothing is hid from His view.  He looks at His creations with satisfaction.  Everything is beautiful.

Everything would be perfect if only His children would behave themselves.