Until the Dawn Breaks and the Shadows Flee
The sky was still a deep lavender blue when Lily awoke early to watch the sun rise over the Alps. “Then came from the zenith a flush of violet sweeping the blue down to the snow of the skyline,” she wrote in her journal later—describing each fresh wave of color as if she were painting it in her mind—“and that was chased down by mauve, and the mauve by dim rosecolour, and the rose by apricot, and then the peak of the Matterhorn flamed up in brilliant rose . . . and the day was come.”
She had never seen light chasing the darkness this way before, and as she stood there in that silent amphitheater of snow and mountains, she imagined another Dawn and an even greater “sweeping out of the darkness” awaiting the earth. “It came as such a parable of waiting for the sunrise that is coming. To miss the first touch of rosecolour is to miss the whole—‘Blessed are all they that wait for Him.’”
The dawn-watcher that morning in 1896 was English painter and missionary Lilias Trotter, little known now but beloved in her own time (one obituary called her a “worldwide spiritual force”). For forty years, she ministered in North Africa with her artist’s eyes trained on beauty wherever it was to be found, leaving behind a trove of illustrated journals, nature parables, stories for Arab children, exquisite watercolors that could fit in the palm of your hand, and an apologetic work for Muslim mystics that was way ahead of its time.
Her old mentor, the renowned art critic John Ruskin, believed the morning sky was the best teacher of color. He was even known to knock on a guest’s bedroom door at sunrise with the eagerness of a child to make sure they were watching. “Love that rightly with all your heart, and soul, and eyes,” he’d written in The Elements of Drawing, “for at dawn you will see perfect scarlets and rubies and violets and golds and greys. Be sure you are always ready to see them, the moment they are painted by God for you.” And Lily did see them, gazing in wonder again and again at each new sunrise over mountains or deserts, capturing them in paint or in parables. She was the sort of person who could look at anything—a thistle, a cloudy sky, a human face—and see the glory of God shining through.
But she was also a woman who looked beyond—beyond present circumstances, beyond visible horizons, beyond even death itself. As those who loved her knew well, no one lived with a more vivid, joyful, standing-on-tiptoes anticipation of eternity than Lily did.
“Christ is risen! He is risen indeed,” we tell each other every year on Easter Sunday, and we believe and profess that we will share in that resurrection life someday. Yet so often we settle for a fuzzy, washed-out picture of our future Hope. Popular culture and paper-thin theology have given us a vague idea of heaven as an ethereal place of endless dull perfection or disembodied bliss, but in the prophet Isaiah’s vision of the new heaven and the new earth (65:17–25), there are houses being built, vineyards being planted, feasting, and laboring. It’s a place where things happen. Paul, in Romans 8, describes all of creation “groaning” in anticipation of its future liberation, when it will be set free from decay and corruption. Revelation paints a glorious picture of the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth—God is coming here, to live among us. All that is good on earth will become what it was always meant to be; all that has been twisted and bent will be restored and made new.
While other Christian doctrines tend to appeal primarily to the intellect or the emotions, new creation makes an enormous demand on the imagination, and that’s a spiritual muscle the church is not used to exercising. But we can’t have hope without using our imagination. We have to look beyond the world as it is to the world as it could be, envisioning a beauty not yet born, trusting and hoping that God’s answers and purposes may lie beyond our horizon, even beyond the horizon of our own lives on earth. Our faith hangs upon an extravagant, world-bending hope for that which we cannot yet see; therefore, Christians of all people should excel at stretching the boundaries of our present reality in every possible direction. Churches should be imagination training centers.
The little mission band that Lilias Trotter founded in Algeria was one such training center. She led them in practicing together this work of imagination, looking through Scripture to find “the most daring things asked for and granted” and “the miracles where God promises to do the unprecedented.” And then she told them to picture in their minds as clearly as they could their “own idea of what the world will be like—what evils will be absent from it and what good things will abound—when Satan’s power in it is abolished.” As they lowered their eyes again from the brilliant colors of the new world they’d imagined down to the brown and greys in front of them, did they see such present struggles in a new light? The death of friends and colleagues, missed opportunities, failed hopes, human limitations, the failing strength of old age, the fear of our own mortality—what looks different if we believe the horizon is not bounded by this life alone?
The vision of eternity Lily gave to her colleagues—as well as to readers of her essays and books, such as Parables of the Cross and Parables of the Christ-Life—is no vague, static “afterlife,” but a continuation and blossoming of the story we’ve already begun, with movement and growth, with things to do and to discover, with adventures to come that we can’t even dream of yet. And if we really grasped resurrection hope as a concrete reality, she firmly believed, it would utterly change our perspective on the present moment. It would change how we pray, how we view our neighbors, how we endure dark hours of grief and disappointment, and how we judge the fruit of our own labors. Compared to the immensity of this hope, there is simply nothing on earth left to be afraid of. We may not be able to see the value of our lives or vocations until that future day, but it will be worth waiting for. “The harvest of the trivial and the monotonous,” she mused in her journal, “may lie out beyond the stars.”
Lily’s constant orientation toward the Not Yet did not diminish the significance of the Now. All the natural beauty around her that she painted so exquisitely was not simply meant for the burn pile; the earth would bear the prints of Jesus’s feet once again, and she couldn’t wait. In the meantime, the beauty she loved so much, the landscapes she delighted to explore, the flowers outside of her window—everything had another layer of meaning to it. The tiny buds in spring, formed in the very scars left behind by leaves that had broken off and fallen away, were little gifts from the God of Hope. The flowers breaking through the snow carried with them the promise of new life even in the midst of winter. The ochre-colored fields in autumn reminded her of the seeds God has planted in the furrows of people’s hearts and the harvest still to come. As she wrote in Parables of the Cross:
“Yes, life is the uppermost, resurrection life, radiant and joyful and strong, for we represent down here Him who liveth and was dead and is alive for evermore . . . above all and through all is the inflowing, overflowing life of Jesus: oh let us not dim it by a shadow of morbidness or of gloom: He is not a God of the dead, but a God of the living, and He would have us let the glory of His gladness shine out.”
Nearly every one of her journals begins or ends (or both) with the image of the close of day and the anticipation of morning—not just the beginning of a new day or a new year, but the birth of new hopes, new possibilities, new opportunities for faith and service, and ultimately, that future dawn on God’s new earth. She looked around at the world and saw creation bursting with “the sunrise gladness of resurrection life.” And she invites us to train our eyes, like an artist would—to notice a thousand little resurrections hidden in the world around us like Easter eggs, to practice (together or alone) the holy game of imagining a world remade, to wait on tiptoes with anticipation and joy, perhaps even to get up before the sun rises and watch the light chasing the darkness as the Divine Artist paints the sky anew.
To miss the first touch of rosecolor is to miss the whole.