When the universe is stilled

The fields are heavy with golden light, imbuing nostalgia into every blade of prairie grass. I am searching the tree line for the outline of hawks, and catching my breath every time a white-breasted kestrel takes flight.

I’ve forgotten how golden this golden hour can be.

I’ve forgotten how light I can feel seeing the skyline again, even if there’s a heaviness I can’t shake.

I’m coming home to begin walking her home. My mom. I can’t imagine her not being here. But I know, soon, she won’t be.

The familiar is more comforting than ever in this moment. Preparing me for what will be so disorienting: Seeing Mom the way I’m about to. Hugging her thin frame. Fearing the one who’s helped hold me together all these years is now breaking down.

How will I do this, Lord? How many times have I prayed something like that this year? And yet you sustain. You remain. You remind. You are here, as you always have been.

If there were ever a place that reminds me of your presence, it’s here, these hills and horizons, these sunset-stained prairies that feel like the very word they represent: home.

That scene flooded back into my mind this week as I read through a biography about Rich Mullins, who sang of a Kansas where “the whole universe was stilled, by the whisper of a prayer.” His songs were the backdrop to my childhood and to my mom’s last week of life, the thread running through.

“He saw that we live in a God-bathed universe,” Mullins’ friend James Bryan Smith writes in the book An Arrow Pointing to Heaven. “For Rich, there was too much beauty around him for two eyes to see, but he did his best, and he wrote songs that help the rest of us catch a glimpse of what he saw.”

Isn’t that the aim of so many of us who take up the pen? It rings true to me as I try to describe what I witnessed that week, what I’ve learned about the Lord by walking so closely with someone through the valley of the shadow of death. It’s an odd place to find beauty, I think, but isn’t it like God to tuck it into unexpected corners?

I’ll be launching a newsletter soon where I’ll share more thoughts and reflections like these, and you'll find them on this website, too. If you’d like to join me, follow this link to a Google form to enter your email, or sign up for the newsletter on this site. I also do most of my writing and thinking on Instagram these days @whitneykpipkin.

Thank you for reading.

Discover More