It’s an iron-clad tradition in our little corner of Southwestern Michigan that at least once before the sun dips below the water, every person will utter the words, “Oooh, look at the lake.”
It has been uttered every night I have been there for the last 35+ years. I am pretty sure it was uttered every night for the years that another house built by my great-grandparents stood in the spot where we now congregate. The words are almost always the same, but they are always inspired because, despite Solomon telling us in Ecclesiastes that there is no new thing under the sun, we have never seen the same view twice – even on the same evening.
I’ve started to suspect, however, that Solomon may have heard that line wrong as he was writing it down (a guy with 700 wives could have been a bit distracted). At least, he forgot to include the part about there being something new under every single sunset because the combination of waves and water on the leaves, of sun and wind and clouds is never the same.
And as we study the lake or the rest of the natural world for the first or the thousandth time, I think maybe Rogers and Hammerstein had a better take on things. In reality, there are actually a million minor miracles happening in front of us all the time if we bother to look.
