Appointment with an Eclipse

To almost see a total solar eclipse is to miss it completely. So on April 8, 2024, I’ll drive two hours for a better view of the moon’s shadow drifting between the earth and sun right above Indianapolis at 3:06:04 p.m.

Eclipses keep a tight schedule, arriving neither early nor late. This particular eclipse will last about three minutes and 50 seconds—no replays, no reruns. Whatever thrill we might experience, whatever spectacle we might enjoy must happen within that time.

We keep appointments with eclipses—calendars marked and necks craned, waiting in excruciating anticipation for splendor we cannot rush or halt. Aberrant darkness tucks in around the world. Crickets chirp. Roosters crow. Cows plod home. We sense our smallness beneath the shadowy dance of the heavens. But for those truly looking, instead of seeing merely the darkened sun, we’ll behold the One on whose cosmic calendar this eclipse was marked before he hung the greater and lesser lights in the sky.

Creator of moon and sun, light and darkness—in him is no shadow of turning.

This article is from Answers magazine, October–December, 2023, p. 72.