Chasing Lights

When my husband first received orders to move to Alaska, we thought we were heading to Anchorage.
We weren't.

Just three weeks before the moving company loaded everything we owned into large shipping crates, we discovered that we were actually heading to a small installation a little ways outside of the northernmost "city" in the interior. I cried.
No mountains. No ski resorts. No whales. No coastal winds saving me from crazy arctic temperatures. There wasn't even a Target.

The one thing we did gain from moving a bit further north was an eight month access pass to one of the great natural phenomenons of our skies--the Aurora Borealis. Apparently the show has been going on since August, but I only caught my first glimpse of it a couple weeks ago.

I kept running into a couple hangups whenever I would try to see it. For one, the Aurora often peaks around these parts in the middle of the night, and I love my sleep too much to waken. The sky might be awake, but this girl ain't. Secondly--and I'm not sure if y'all have heard this--Aurora displays take place outside, and it happens to be really, *really* cold here.
Pair those two things with the fact that you need just the right amount of solar activity in conjunction with a cloudless sky, the right elevation to keep trees from blocking your view, no lights at all, and constant watch (sometimes the lights will be out for hours, but sometimes just a few minutes at a time)... then you start to understand why people will pay bookoos of their hard-earned dollars to sleep in a remote hotel room with a specialty wake-up call if the lights happen to be out.
I'm not that fancy.

One clear, cold Saturday night, my family piled into my husband's pickup truck, we drove to the top of a hill at midnight, and we waited...
And we watched...
And we waited some more...

Finally, we saw it! Clear as day, a rippling streak illuminated the sky and spiraled across it. I could see the line "light up" at one end, and then it rose in columns. It was beautiful. It was big. It was definitely the northern lights.

But it wasn't green.

I was so confused. Every photo I had ever seen of the lights was a bright, neon green light. What I was seeing looked a lot like an illuminated cloud. I kept thinking there was a pale green hue to it, but I couldn't tell if it was actually greenish or if I just really wanted it to be. My husband and I took our sleepy children out of the car and we "ooohed" and "aahed" together, then we hopped back into the truck and drove around to get different angles from other places we'd read were prime viewing spots. Everywhere we looked it was the same thing. Huge, dominating, bright white *with a hint of possibly imaginary pale green* lines of light across the sky.

What I was looking at was absolutely wondrous. It just wasn't the exact thing I was expecting, so it bothered me.

Later that next morning, my husband and I started doing some online research. Why weren't our lights green?
Friends, take a moment to do a quick Google image search:
Aurora Borealis eye vs picture

(Don't worry. I'll wait...)

Y'all! Do you see it? It's mostly a trick of the lens!!!
Not on purpose, of course. Something about the filters of the lens and the different exposures capture that vivid hue. It's accidental photo-shopping. Absolutely spectacular displays will show up with brighter colors, but more often than not, it appears to our naked eyes as a white or pale green light.

I was spinning! How this is not more common knowledge is crazy to me!!

But true to form, it all got me thinking...

Nothing about those pale green lights was anything other than stunningly beautiful. It was glorious, actually. That night the sky was so clear, I could see the Milky Way blending in with the brightest stars...and because apparently that wasn't pretty enough to knock me right over, these dancing swirls of light appeared. And what in the world did I do when immersed in such natural beauty??
I griped that they weren't green enough.

That is just plain discouraging. But if I'm honest with myself, I do that mess all the time--I'm doing it here and now!!

I photo-shopped up a beautiful picture of Alaska in my mind, and because the real deal is not the exact thing that I was expecting, I let it bother me.

I don't know if you're at all like me in this way, but maybe you are.

Maybe your degree didn't take you as far as you imagined it would. Maybe your job isn't as fulfilling as you dreamed it would be. Maybe your house isn't Pinterest-perfect. Parenthood isn't as constantly rewarding. Marriage is not as blissfully romantic. Maybe growing up just feels like getting old.

But does that mean none of these things are good? Are these things not still bright accomplishments, brilliant motivators, and spectacular blessings--just as they really are?

Friends, I believe that most of us are so busy chasing the brightest version of things that we forget to appreciate the raw, real beauty that is actually all around us. I'm sure if we took a moment to look through a truer lens, what we saw would be pretty enough to knock us right over.

Maybe all of those spectacular pictures we created of what things ought to look like are totally fake--hopes that we've filtered and exposed through the lenses of high expectations and time.

Let's set aside the images of what we hoped to see and focus instead on the lights that are right in front of us.
Because things don't have to be the very brightest for them to be beautiful just the same.