Author: elizabethprata

By Elizabeth Prata

I like to get to work about a half hour early. There are many reasons for this. A practical reason is that I have the first duty at opening bell, and then I go right into teaching small groups. I need a few minutes to prepare the room and my materials.

I also enjoy seeing the school ‘wake up’. There are only a few people there when I arrive. Someone is in the front office manning the phones, but I go in by the back. I greet the lone custodian who comes in half an hour before I do, and we chat a moment. She is a Christian lady and we usually take time to pause and praise the Savior. The lunch ladies scuttling around in the kitchen, banging pots and opening oven doors, making breakfast ready for the kids who enter beginning at 7:10am.

The school’s lights are on in the cafeteria and on the other side of the building in the office but in between it’s dark, quiet, and calm. As more staff trickle in the school wakes up. It almost feels like an organism opening one eye, then the other, then stretching, then rising, then bounding over the meadows.

I enjoy watching the day wake up too. I admire the School District’s handling of money and how they maintain the campuses. Our school has a lower elementary with 3 playgrounds, an upper elementary with some raised gardens, the Board Office next to that, and the High school next to that, with numerous fields and outbuildings. Behind it all is the PreK school and the transportation garage with many buses starting up. All these are all well maintained.

So when I arrive I pause to see the floodlights streaming over the fields, the distant whistle at the high school as the football team practices, the transportation garage idling buses, the cut grass and rolling fields around the track.

But then I look up. It’s my favorite part. I see Orion constellation beaming down his starlight. He is embedded in a velvet blanket of purple as the sky begins to slightly lighten. It’s the gloaming time when as Yeats says, “The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light”. The moon is a crescent fingernail and just off the tip of the pointy edge, is bright Venus.

As I arrive each day I notice that Orion is moving to the right, to the east and rising higher. The planets in their courses revolve on the plane of the ecliptic. I marvel that God placed them there, hung them all on nothing. What a God we serve.

Pause in your day and look up. Look around. Find something to rejoice in. Discover what can be praised to the Lord. A towering evergreen you pass each day? A puffy cloud that looks like a mountain of sheep? The blue sky dazzling bright? A family of foxes scampering over the field? Dew glistening on the early morning grass? Hoar-frost on the fence?