Hope in Every Sunrise
Seeing each day as a promise.
Sunrises were wasted on Mei-Ling Chen for most of her adult life.
Not because she was indifferent to beauty. She was not. She noticed things: the particular green of new leaves in April, the way rain smelled on warm pavement, the precise moment a piece of music resolved into something that made your chest loosen unexpectedly. She was a person of quiet, attentive sensibility, which made it all the more telling that she had spent years sleeping through the one daily event that required nothing of her except to be present for it.
She was forty-seven, a Taiwanese-American architect based in Portland, Oregon, a woman of clean lines and considered spaces who designed buildings that made people feel held without quite being able to explain why. Her professional reputation was excellent. Her personal life was, by the time she arrived at the season this story is really about, in the process of being carefully rebuilt after being thoroughly dismantled.
Her marriage had ended two years prior. Not with cruelty or drama but with the slow, sad unwinding of two people who had grown in different directions over fifteen years and had waited too long to say so. The divorce had been civil. The grief had been considerable. And the life she had woken up to on the other side of it, quieter, smaller, more her own than it had been in years, had taken considerable getting used to.
She had moved into a small apartment on the east side of the city, the top floor of a converted Victorian house, with windows that faced east. She had not chosen it for that reason. She had chosen it for the bones of the building, the original cornices, the way the light moved through the front rooms in the afternoon. The east-facing bedroom window had simply come with the apartment, unremarked upon, until the morning three weeks after she moved in when she woke at five-forty-five and could not get back to sleep.
She lay in the unfamiliar room in the unfamiliar quiet and listened to the city beginning its day. And then, because there was nothing else to do, she turned her head toward the window.
What she saw stopped something in her that had been running fast for a very long time.
The sky was doing something extraordinary. Layers of colour she had no precise names for: not quite rose, not quite amber, a thin line of gold where the horizon met the edge of the rooftops, and above it all a deepening blue that had not yet decided to be full daylight. It lasted perhaps ten minutes before the ordinary grey of a Portland morning settled in.
But for those ten minutes, Mei-Ling lay completely still and simply looked.
She did not pray. She was not, at that point in her life, in the habit of regular prayer. She had grown up attending a Presbyterian church with her parents, had maintained a loose connection to faith through her twenties, and had let it drift during the busy decades of building a career and a marriage simultaneously. God was not absent from her thinking; He was more like a presence she acknowledged distantly, the way you acknowledge a neighbour you mean to spend more time with and somehow never do.
But lying in her bed watching that sky, she felt something she had not felt in months: a loosening. A small, unexpected sense that the world was larger than her grief and the day ahead was new in a way that her yesterday had not managed to diminish.
She got up and made coffee. She stood at the window with the mug warm in both hands and watched the sky finish its transformation. And she thought, without quite deciding to think it: whoever made this did it again today. Whatever yesterday held, this was made fresh.
She woke early the next morning. And the one after that.
Not by alarm. By something quieter than alarm, a kind of interior orientation toward the window, toward the few minutes of colour and light that were apparently happening every single morning with or without her knowledge or attendance.
She started getting up deliberately for it. Making her coffee first, then standing at the window, then sitting in the chair she had moved to face it, wrapped in the blanket her mother had made her when she graduated from architecture school. Twenty minutes of watching the sky before the day made any demands.
It was not, at first, a spiritual practice. It was a habit she fell into because it made her feel better, and she was pragmatic enough to keep doing things that made her feel better.
But it became something more.
Her friend and colleague Janet, a warm and openly faithful woman of Puerto Rican descent who had been gently, patiently present through the entire arc of Mei-Ling's divorce without ever pushing or preaching, came over for dinner one evening and heard about the sunrise mornings.
Janet set down her fork and smiled in the particular way she had when something pleased her deeply.
"You know what that is, don't you?" she said.
Mei-Ling raised an eyebrow.
"Lamentations 3:22-23," Janet said, with the easy familiarity of someone who carries Scripture the way some people carry favourite songs. "His mercies are new every morning. Great is his faithfulness." She paused. "You have been watching the proof of it every single day. You just have not had the caption for the picture yet."
Mei-Ling thought about that for a long time after Janet went home.
His mercies are new every morning. She turned the phrase over slowly, the way she turned over a design problem, looking at it from different angles, testing its weight.
New. Not recycled. Not the leftovers of yesterday's mercy, redistributed. New. Made fresh. The same God who had overseen the previous day, with all its grief and its difficulty and its persistent evidence that things had not gone the way she had planned: that same God had made this morning from scratch, with its own specific allocation of mercy, untouched by what came before.
There was something in that idea that reached into a place grief had been occupying and began, quietly, to rearrange the furniture.
She had been living in the aftermath of her marriage the way you live in a room where something has broken: carefully, watching where you stepped, still registering the loss in every corner. And while she had been looking at what was broken, the sky had been doing something extraordinary every single morning six inches above her grief, and she had nearly missed all of it.
She started praying at the window. Not formally. Not with the correct posture or the right vocabulary. Just talking, the way she had learned from watching Janet that talking to God could be: conversational, imperfect, and entirely acceptable in that form.
She thanked Him for the sky. She told Him about the hard things, the loneliness that arrived most forcefully on Sunday afternoons, the professional decisions that felt weightier without a partner to think out loud with, the specific, nagging fear that she had left it too late to build the kind of life she actually wanted.
She told Him the true things, the way honest prayer requires, and found that the telling was its own form of relief.
She went back to church in January, a small congregation not far from her apartment where nobody made a fuss of her arrival and the pastor preached in a way that suggested he had read widely and thought deeply and was not interested in easy answers. She sat at the end of a row, third from the back, and let herself be a person who was returning rather than a person who had never left. The distinction mattered to her.
She joined a small midweek group that Janet attended, six or seven people around a table with open Bibles and honest questions, and found that the honesty of other people's faith journeys made her own feel less like a failure and more like a normal, human, work-in-progress kind of thing.
A woman named Sylvia in the group, a retired schoolteacher in her seventies with silver hair and the specific, settled quality of someone who has arrived at peace through considerable effort, said something during one session that Mei-Ling wrote down and pinned above her desk at the office.
"Hope is not optimism," Sylvia said, looking at no one in particular and everyone simultaneously. "Optimism is what you have when circumstances are favourable. Hope is what you have when they are not. Hope says: this is not the end of the story. And it says that on the hard days especially."
Mei-Ling looked at those words every working day for months.
Because that was the thing about the sunrise that she had been slowly learning to articulate: it was not promising that the day ahead would be easy. It was not guaranteeing outcomes or removing difficulties or offering a forecast. It was simply showing up. Every morning, regardless of what the previous day had contained, the sky did its extraordinary thing and the light came and the world started again.
That was hope in its most elemental form. Not dependent on circumstances. Not contingent on yesterday. Just: here is a new morning, and with it something you did not have before, and the God who made it has not changed His mind about you.
By spring, Mei-Ling had started doing something she had not planned and could not entirely explain. She had begun sending a single photograph every morning to a small group of people in her phone contacts: her mother, Janet, a cousin in Taipei who was going through a difficult season, a former colleague who was recovering from illness, and two or three others. Just the view from her window. No caption. Just the sky.
Her mother called one morning after receiving several weeks of photographs and said: "Mei-Ling. What are you sending me?"
"Sunrise," Mei-Ling said.
A pause. "Every morning you take a picture?"
"Every morning."
Another pause, softer than the first. Her mother's voice when she spoke again was the warm, slightly undone voice of a woman who was moved but would not say so directly. "It is very beautiful," she said. "Send me tomorrow's too."
She did. She always did.
The photographs became, without Mei-Ling ever designing them that way, a small daily act of shared hope. A way of saying, to the people she loved: look, the light came back. It came back yesterday and the day before and it is here again today. Whatever you are carrying this morning: the light came back.
Isaiah 43:19 had become one of her favourite verses, found during a late-night reading session that had started as sleeplessness and ended as something better: "See, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?"
Do you not perceive it. The question implied it was already happening. The new thing was already in motion. The perceiving was the part that required something of her: attention, willingness, the decision to look up from her grief and toward the window.
She had looked up. She was still looking.
Two years after moving into the apartment with the east-facing window, Mei-Ling Chen had not solved every difficult thing in her life. The loneliness visited sometimes. The questions about the future had not all been answered. The rebuilding of a life was, she had learned, slower work than the dismantling of one, and it required a patience she was still developing.
But she woke every morning with something she had not had before: a reliable, daily, entirely free reminder that mercy was available, that the story was not finished, that the God who made the first light was still in the business of making mornings.
She stood at her window with her coffee, the blanket around her shoulders, and watched the sky do what it always did.
Pink. Then gold. Then the wide, unhurried blue of a day that had not been lived yet.
A promise, kept again.
She breathed it in. And she was, in all the ways that actually matter, deeply and quietly and genuinely: hopeful.
"Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." Lamentations 3:22-23
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