I have sat in duck blinds, deer stands, dove fields, and turkey blinds, to watch sunrises for over half a century, man and boy. I continue to be amazed at the things I see that I’ve never seen before, after all those years. It happened again a few years ago.
Adam and I sat in a duck blind on New Year’s Eve weekend, even though we knew when we left the house that the pothole would probably be frozen up. It was, too. But we were already up, had had breakfast and coffee, and I had a full thermos of Slung Coffee with me. We resolved to stay for a while, at least until the coffee got drunk.
I was on the second cup, teetotally undisturbed by ducks, when the sky began to turn pinkish in the east. Adam is colorblind, so cannot appreciate the subtle nuances of a sunrise like I can, but he was at least paying attention. When a shaft of pink-orange light suddenly appeared from below the horizon, he was as puzzled as I was.
How to describe it? Well, a cloud front had come in from the west, covering about 90% of the sky. The remaining clear 10% was, of course, in the east. The sun was still below the horizon, but right over it, this single shaft of light shone straight up from where the sun was obviously fixing to emanate from. Hold your hand out at arm’s length, sticking up. Sight to the horizon over it. Now, close your thumb and little finger in. No, still too wide. Fold in your ring finger. That’s it!
The shaft of pink-orange light was just that wide, shining straight up from the as-yet unseen sun, up to about ten degrees on the clear horizon, just under that cloud bank. Only that single shaft. Now, seeing a single beam of sunlight is not that unusual, right? Everyone has seen the sun shining down like that through a hole in the clouds.
Right. But this beam was shining UP! And there were no clouds between the sun and the horizon. It SHOULD have been a bright semicircle of light, glowing pink-orange to herald the coming dawn. NOT one solitary shaft of light!
My son and I remarked on it, and tried to figure a logical explanation. Maybe it wasn’t the sunrise atall, but a fire, or a searchlight just below the horizon. As we watched and speculated, of all things, the shaft of light grew – but not wider: taller!
Now it moved its beam up onto the base of the clouds, higher and higher, until that single beam was stretching up probably 20 degrees over the horizon. More than ever now, it seemed that it was in all probability a fire of some kind. While Adam couldn’t tell the color, I had never seen a pink-orange searchlight, so it had to be a fire.
Nope – well, in a manner of speaking, it was a fire – it really was the sun. Just the very tippy-top of the sun soon glowed at the edge of the horizon, verifying that it was the source of the light shaft we were witnessing.
Yet at this point in a sunrise, it’s supposed to be a glowing semi-circular halo. This day, though, it was sure different. There was absolutely NO halo – the sun was a third of the way up, and though the sun itself was understandably bright, the main glow from it was still only that single shaft of light, now turning from pinkish-orange to faded red, then to darker red, stretching now maybe 25 degrees up over the horizon.
The sun was halfway up before the glowing shaft disappeared, to be replaced by your standard, garden-variety semi-circular halo, which became a circular halo as the sun cleared the earth briefly, before the clouds began to obscure the whole scene.
You probably think I’m going on a little too much about this phenomenon, but as I said to begin with, I’ve seen a LOT of dawns, yet never one like this.
Okay, here’s where we get to the religion part, so you can go on to the shoe ads if the mention of religion offends you.
The two of us in the blind that morning were both facing life-changing decisions. Both of us have strong faith, and have known the Creator personally. Both of our decisions involved God-based dichotomies.
Was the Creator speaking directly to us? Was He clearly saying, “Follow Me!” Was he laying it out for us at the end of the 20th Century as He did for the Hebrew children wandering in the wilderness 3400 years ago? “A Pillar of Cloud by day, and a Pillar of Fire by night”: Could that be it, just for us two Neill men?
Well, did anyone ELSE see it that morning?
