With an ever-increasing brilliance, through the branches of the trees, the sun can be seen peeking its head up with a blast of color. The heavens have labored through the night, and now a new day has been born. 

This newborn day will hold all the hopes, joy, love, despair, sorrow, pain, and all else that is a part of a day that is lived. No matter what the day may hold, it is a new gift given by God.

Each moment is a new moment, each breath a gift, each movement a blessing.  It can be said of each day, “This is the Day that the Lord has made – I will rejoice and be glad in it!”

Yesterday is now a day gone and already lived. Learn from it, rejoice that we had it, but it no longer exists.

Tomorrow is a dream and a hope, but not a promise. Plan for it, appropriately, look forward to it expectantly, but remember it does not yet exist but in the anticipation that possibly God will allow us to experience it. 

But today – today is real and now. It is the moment in which we take our present breath. It is the time that we have in our hands to mold and to use. How joyous it is to look back on a day where love has filled the hours, a day lived as a servant of the Promiser of days and Giver of life.

The sun will return into the night. The dark will envelope the once-lit sky, and the moon and stars will take over the course of the day. We will lay our weary heads down to rest and wait to see tomorrow become today. What a precious gift that is from our loving God. 

One more sunrise. And with each sunrise a day passes by. Those days add up to weeks, then months, then years. One day, we will see our last sunrise; we will live our final day. But we will rejoice in what we had, and enjoy eternal day with God, if we have met Him at the cross.

Dean Kelly is minister at Highland Home Church of Christ.