Suddenly, the light was all gold and catching in the wet

I wrote to my friend Claire a couple of weeks ago: "Right now, the world seems gray, and I need a sunset."

We were riding a train through the Romanian countryside, me and Missy. I was having a hard time accepting God's grace and having grace for myself. It had been forests and tunnels and villages in fields throughout the ride, and we were talking.

All of a sudden, we were in this clearing, on top of this hill, looking down into this village in the valley between the two green mountainsides, small square houses painted in reds and yellows and greens and pinks with a pristine white church and its steeple pointing to the sky. It had just finished raining and it was evening and the light was all gold and catching in the wet that still lay on the ground. We ran to the window.

And then we noticed the rainbow, the most vibrant one I've seen, and then we noticed the second, fainter one and then we drove under it and all of this happening in this valley, despite prior decades of communism, despite the presence of death of the generation of men and women who still dress traditionally, despite the alcohol one local told us is the people's drug of choice. Me getting to experience all this beauty despite how undeserving I felt, despite giving in to fear, despite my un-love; love was still being given to me.

I was left breathless.

Gungor's song "Beautiful Things" came to mind: "You make beautiful things, you make beautiful things out of the dust. You make beautiful things, you make beautiful things out of us."

Before the valley, this is what I saw:

The man, older, standing there on the dark brown earth, arms at his sides until he raised one to scratch his nose, earth brown pants and matching vest and long-sleeved tan shirt underneath, hair poking out in tufts above his ears, watching the train go by. The older woman, sitting on the bench outside the gate of her house, in her floral head scarf and blouse tucked into her knee-length cloth skirt, brown skin and wrinkles, watching. The boy in the red shirt, holding a curled rope, standing with the cows and sheep in the open field next to the train tracks at the station, the only sound the tinning of the cow's bell around her neck so she could be easily found, and crickets.

The two teenage girls sitting on the bench, pink and red shirts and sweatpants, talking. The boy riding his bike with no hands, the three who watched the train and the one in the middle who waved, holding a plastic bottle with no label and white liquid inside, the young man hugging his grandma as he walked her to the gate of her home. The family in the field who saw us on the train and started waving, dancing and laughing. The piles of hand-cut and hand-raked hay in the fields, the neat rows of plants starting to come up that someone had to hunch over to plant in the large-but-not-too-large gardens beside each house.

Life being lived, its sorrows, joys, stillness and motion.

He loves us.