The heavens declare the glory of God, *
and the firmament shows his handiwork.
One day tells its tale to another, *
and one night imparts knowledge to another.
– Psalm 19:1-2

For a few brief weeks each year, I get to see the sunrise.

The daily schedules of work and school don’t shift with the seasons, so I tend to sit on the couch drinking coffee at around the same time every day. In late December, it’s already dark. By June, it’s already been light for hours. But for a few precious weeks in January, sunrise falls somewhere around coffee o’clock, when I’m the only one awake and can sit and look at the sky.

This morning was a good one.

I’ve always loved these opening words of Psalm 19 because of the way they imagine the clouds and the stars and the planets in the sky glorifying God: not by singing or by praying or by sacrificial rites, but by being themselves, exactly as they are, exactly as God intends them to be. They don’t have free will, of course; with a few exceptions subject to the intricacies of relativity and quantum mechanics, they are bound to follow the simple rules of Newtonian physics. But their doing exactly that—their following their natures so precisely—is what causes God’s great delight. Light refracted through the early-morning sky cannot but skew toward orange, and yet “the heavens declare the glory of God” nevertheless.

I find it a useful image because we human beings so rarely do the same. Unlike the planets set in their courses, we do have free will. We can and do wander out of our paths. We can and do acts in ways that don’t accord with our true selves. God set the planets to orbit around the sun, and they do it, to the glory of God. God created us to love God and one another, and we don’t do it so well, but when we do—the glory’s even greater!

Most of us, by the grace of God, have a pretty good sense of who we are. You can call it conscience, or self-knowledge, or the Holy Spirit, but for the most part, we have a pretty good sense of who we are in our most authentic selves. It’s harder to express it, to live it, to give ourselves permission fully to be ourselves, as we are.

But you are a creature of God! You were formed and molded from before time to be who you are, and God is glorified when you are, no less than by the cycles of the stars, for—as the second-century theologian Irenaeus of Lyons once wrote—“the glory of God is a human being, fully alive.”