Twenty Something / Christina Capecchi

Second by second, minute by minute, day by day, God is moving in us

The older I get, the more I appreciate the math of meteorology. Something has shifted in me, and now I’m all ears when my retired neighbor rattles off numbers from his rain gauge.

What appeals to me, I think, is the precision. We can measure forces of nature—rainfall, snowfall, temperature—and in our uncertain world, we can know them for certain. We can pinpoint them to our backyard—exactly where and exactly when we experienced them.

It offers a rare kind of certainty—the confirmation of a shared experience. “Yes, I was there, I witnessed that, too.”

Weather gives us something to rally around, something we can agree on. The rain really did fall. The temperature really did drop. In a world where so much feels subject to debate, these measurements let us say together: “This happened.”

Of all the weather stats, the most hopeful one is happening now: our steady march toward summer. This movement is measured in seconds.

It begins on Dec. 21, the winter solstice, when the sun sets here in St. Paul, Minn., at 4:33 p.m. One day later, we northerners gain 4 seconds of daylight. The second day after the solstice, we gain 9 seconds. The third day, 14. The fourth day, 19. The fifth day, 24.

Shall I continue with these riveting numbers?

They are drenched in optimism.

All that incremental progress adds up. Tiny gains that stack up to big ones. By the time March arrives, we’ve gained nearly two and a half hours of daylight. And the biggest change of all here happens this month.

March does the most work to carry us to summer, the heaviest lifting, when our hemisphere turns toward the sun at its quickest pace. We see our biggest gains in

St. Paul in mid-March, when a single day adds 3 minutes and 9 seconds of daylight. From that first daily increase of just 4 seconds, it’s a marked jump.

It makes for a busy month. During the duration of March in St. Paul—just 31 days—we gain one hour, 34 minutes and 17 seconds of daylight. We hold at that peak for about two weeks before the pace eases in April and May, even as the days keep lengthening. Once we reach the summer solstice, in total we’ve added 6 hours, 55 minutes and 2 seconds of daylight since winter solstice.

This fact of nature instills such confidence. Our swing to the sun is guaranteed. No matter how badly we mess up, it’s a sure thing, a promise of progress made each day.

So too is God’s grace, working in us daily, transforming us in barely perceptible increments—

4-second gains that add up to 7 hours. St. Paul the Apostle pledges this with the same kind of certainty. “I am confident of this,” he writes in his Letter to the Philippians, “that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil 1:6).

Good work is underway in you and in me. God is moving in us right now—second by second, step by step. Even when we can’t feel it, even if it is still dark, even though we fail, we are turning toward the Son. We are becoming more fully ourselves, made in God’s image. And this work will be brought to completion. God will see us through.
 

(Christina Capecchi is a freelance writer from Grey Cloud Island, Minn.) †