BE IN THE MOMENT, BE AWARE OF THE MOMENT

 The northern lights, or aurora borealis as they’re technically called, have been put on my bucket list recently. Let’s simply call them aurora for the rest of the blog. An Aurora is a natural light display in the earths sky, predominately seen in higher altitudes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately and since my smart phone seems to know what I think about before I do, I’ve been seeing a ton of pictures and ads for viewing them. My specific bucket list item is to literally be directly under them and have them dancing all around me. I’ve seen videos of this and it’s like a flowing stream overhead of green yellow and red gaseous lights. To get this type of experience one would need to be in Alaska, Canada, or the Sweden/Norway/Finland areas in winter months. Until that happens, I’ve been following aurora forecast sites for my area of North America, and the opportunities are usually pretty slim. The forecast ratings are in a 1-10 scale, with 1 being you are not going to see anything, and 10 being you are in the thick of it. A few days ago, we had a forecast of 5, which means you may see something…or you may not. So, my wife and I grabbed some extra cloths and headed north a few hours. We ended up on the edge of lake with our son who lives in that area.

 

We arrived right at sunset and were able to enjoy the sun saying goodnight over the frozen lake.

For the next two hours the focus was on the northern horizon and wait for what could be. I set my camera phone up on a tripod. Just so you know, a camera phone is not the best device for night pictures, but I did have the “nightcap app” to help. As we stared to the north, a few other star gazers slowly joined us. While they walked up behind us, I looked to the south and saw some early stars popping out in the sky.

Once again, the focus was back to the northern horizon. We squinted our eyes and stared intently. Every so often we’d asked each other, “do you see anything?” The answer was typically, “maybe that’s something over there.” Still, we focused to the northern horizon. At one point I stretched my neck upward and saw how full the sky above was with stars.

And then back to the northern horizon we focused our eyes. We slowly started to see something; a slight glow just beyond the trees, and then another faint one to the right, and then a very faint streak above them. Could this be it, is this the beginning of the spectacular light show we had been waiting for? We stared for another 45 minutes and nothing more happened; in fact, it started to fade. The other star gazers had already left and my wife’s feet had been frozen for too long, so we packed it up and left.

Thankfully, there were moments when we stopped to look around and look up. Had we focused on the one thing we thought we should see the entire time, we would have missed the other things that were actually right on top of us.

1 Thessalonians 5:18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.