God has a way of turning our night into day.

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It is the LORD who created the stars, the Pleiades and Orion.
He turns darkness into morning and day into night.
He draws up water from the oceans and pours it down as rain on the land.
The LORD is his name!
Amos 5:8 New Living Translation

I took this picture sometime around 10:00 pm at Lutheran Valley Retreat. I’ve made time to do some night photography at all but one of our Holy Cross men’s retreats. (Granted, that’s only four out of five retreats.) My friend, Nathan, has joined me for the past two nighttime excursions. Since it was a new moon last year, we captured the Milky Way. The opposite was true this September. Not only did the moon shine with all its glory, the sky was cloudless…and boring.

We tried taking pictures of the full moon, did some light painting of the aspen, and took some long exposures, but it was a fruitless night until we headed back to Moose Lodge. On the dirt road that was lit as if it were early dawn, I noticed that the moon shone brilliantly on Cedar Mountain. I stopped, set up my tripod and took a few photographs. This picture is the result.

The camera has the ability to turn night into day. The power of God’s grace that raised Jesus from the dead turns our “darkness into morning.”

There are days that we feel discouraged. Our attempts at getting things “right” turn out wrong and sometimes make life worse. We head back to our ho-hum lives discouraged.

What we cannot do, God does for us. The circumstances of our lives might not change, but in Christ we know that God will turn our darkness into morning. This change may not happen in this life but in the life that God has prepared for us on the day of resurrection.

By faith we hold on to Jesus when it seems that there isn’t much else to grasp. And in holding on to him, we find the ability to say, “The Lord turns my darkness into morning…The Lord is his name!”

Text and Picture Copyright Douglas P Brauner