I have an ongoing love affair with clouds. I think it started when at only 4 or 5 years of age my cousins and I would lie on the grass and look up at the big Phoenix sky and search for shapes in the clouds… A lamb, a tree, a puppy dog. ever changing, leaving room for imagination and to pretend.

Life happens, our focus lowers to the necessary, critical and mundane. We forget to look up at God’s ever-changing art display above.

When my beautiful daughter suddenly died two years ago, I found myself searching the skies in my pain, wondering if she was now free up there, beyond the clouds, looking down on us. I began to take photos with my phone when a group of clouds impressed me. The glorious Tucson sunsets, the monsoon clouds taking my breath at times.

I took photo after photo, scrolling through them on dark days reliving their beauty, finding comfort in God’s handiwork.

Recently a vivid sunset, fiery with pinks and oranges, forced me to stop my car to capture their beauty. After five or six frame-worthy snapshots, for some reason I turned around to see what the sky behind was doing during all this brilliant display.

Oh my goodness, it was grey, dark, gloomy and no sky between their cloudy billows. I could not believe this was the same moment, standing in the same place, and totally opposite the flaming beauty of the western skies.

The same sky, same street corner, same moment in time, but the view totally changed by the location of the sun and where I chose to look; my perspective making all the difference.

So very much like our lives…the position of the Son and where we choose to focus our view.

There may be dark, gloomy cloudy days, but there can be hope and glorious beauty if you look around and change your perspective.