On dark nights as we sit on the porch at the cabin, things feel still and quiet, and the stars shine bright.
Constellations change throughout the year, as proved true by my college astronomy project where we tracked them with a pencil on the back of a pizza box on an old country road. It was helpful to confirm both that constellations do move and that my friend later-turned-husband wasn’t a murderer, because that would have been his chance.
Fast forward to today…my kids have an app, SkyView Lite, that shows you the constellations, the International Space Station, and identifies which twinkles are merely the sky noise of satellites buzzing across the darkness.
Surrounded by the quiet and yet perpetual motion…it seems like our lives can be the same way sometimes, always moving and changing. In all of the movement, one thing remains constant: True North.
When you find the North Star, everything else aligns around it. Whether you are using a pizza box or the app, if you don’t spot the North Star, you will search endlessly for the one thing that brings order, leading everything else to align.
It’s the same with our hearts…we must stop and consistently choose to find our True North and hang our hope there or the noisy and urgent things will distract us and lead us astray. When we find the North Star, we will find our way home on the darkest of nights. It is the goodness of God to give us physical signs of His timeless consistency.
We find the constellations in their arrangements decorating the sky based on their relationship to the North Star, seeming to be their guide as to where to stand. As our hearts head towards Him, life will begin to make sense if we will hang our hope there. It may feel scary and uncomfortable, place your hope and watch the Ultimate Arranger.
I know where to stand because I know my God as my True North. I can choose to place my gaze even when the requirements of the day spin round and round, always in movement. In the darkest of night and the wildest of days, I find my home and my rest in my True North, leading my life now and forevermore.
