Photo and Commentary ©2026 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday and Monday, August 2 and 3, 2026
I don’t think I’m much of a desert person. (Although, I am definitely a dessert person, if you’re serving up homemade apple pie!) Heat, with or without humidity, makes me a whimpering, damp, limp rag of a person.
But sometimes I wonder if I could be very much a desert person, if I’d been born in cacti country, if that climate had formed my earliest memories.
I’ll never know. What I do know is that I’m a child of mountains and oceans, evergreens and eagles. You can imagine my delight when my Midwest prairie born-and-raised husband stepped out of the airplane that had brought us on his first trip to my beloved southeastern Alaska home, took a deep breath, and exclaimed how fresh the air was. This trip home was a gift from my parents on the occasion of our first anniversary, and I knew I had married well!
But what about his prairies? When he had driven me home to meet his family (a trip I took with a certain amount of trepidation), did I step out of the car in his parents’ farmhouse driveway and exclaim enthusiastically about my surroundings?
I’m sure I didn’t. I was too intent on looking and behaving like someone his family would welcome into their midst, because I was hoping to join their family in the near future.
We took many trips back to his South Dakota family in the ensuing months, and while I quickly grew fond of his people, it took me longer to warm up to his place. I was too aware of what wasn’t there — I missed my mountains. The land was so flat!
But I grew to realize that when you’re minus mountains, you have a whole lot more sky. And what a sky it could be! Thunderclouds could roll in and rustle up a storm adventure on short notice. Sunrises and sunsets had a vast canvas on which to paint their colors. My mother-in-law kept her eye on the sky and could accurately predict the weather as she sized up the look of the clouds and the direction of the wind.
I still remember a New Year’s Eve from over thirty years ago, when we drove back to his parents’ house after visiting friends who lived miles out in the country. It was a cold, clear night, and when we stepped out of the car at home we were dazzled by the multitude of stars overhead. The sky was thick with stars, and I once again forgave the prairies for not having mountains, since they put on such incredible displays of sky.
My photo above is not from South Dakota or Alaska. It’s from here, a few houses away from our home. We were returning from a walk at sunset, when the clouds became a magnificent masterpiece overhead.
A masterpiece that reminded me of our Master, and the beginning of a song David wrote about Him:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
(Psalm 19:1 NIV)
No matter what state I’m in, literal or emotional, looking up calms my soul. It reminds me that there is a Master Artist who is also my Creator and Redeemer. And one of these days we will look up for the best and brightest sky sight of all:
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words. (I Thessalonians 4:16-18)