The sun has burned the bars of the clouds and the sky has opened in the west.

These hills, in their humble old age, are down to their last verse. In the next geologic age they will be sand in the water and the wind. When I turned into them, following the water and the sun, and no man’s map today on the back roads, there were no soaring vistas, no great edifices of man, but the oak and rock. No tourist guidebook will ever mark these hills for they are nothing special….nothing but life itself.

And perhaps this house has come to that long last verse: that point when the singer knows one song ends rising higher and the breathless pause before another begins. Perhaps within the times of those living this house will become something else than what it is in this present moment. And the only prayer for the future is that it may be as loved.

But the beauty of the life that is here in this evening will remain in God’s hand if nowhere else, the sparrow’s wings are no less glorious than the eagle’s.