In Life’s Extras … Archibald Rutledge tells this story. ” I once had a curious experience with a star. I was driving home to the plantation in the old motor-less days, when I was overtaken at dusk by a storm of hurricane violence. Inky darkness shrouded the world. I could not even see the road ahead or behind. The thunder and lightning were appalling.

Finally , a bolt struck a pine not twenty feet from my buggy. My horse had stood a good deal from this storm: but now he made a sudden dash. He broke away through the forest and I could not hold him. In a moment he had run between two pines standing close together, had smashed both shafts, , and had torn loose from the buggy and me. Into the howling darkness he vanished.

The rain came down as if it meant to make a joke of The Flood. The thunder blared. The lightning became most uncomfortably intimate and intrusive. I heard near me great trees go crashing down in the fury of the tempest. Alone I was, defenseless, in profound darkness. I knew in a way where I was, and to locate myself the better I looked toward what I believed to be the west.

Through the heavy arras of the rain, to my amazement, I saw a little rift in the storm- rack , hardly bigger than my hand, in the very heart of which the evening star gleamed in dewey- silver solitude. I all the stillness of felicity it shone sternly, saying to my heart, ” This storm is an imposter. It is momentary. The sky is here , and the stars: all shall be well”

Amid all the desolation about me, and the seemingly hopeless chaos, here came a celestial message. Shining through the storm-rack, it’s light reminded me of something past our world. Taking heart , I waded out to the road, found my horse waiting for me half a mile down gleaming it’s gleaming length, rode through homeward through the breaking storm, and reached the house in full , calm starlight.

Stars fill me with a sense of God; and the heart cannot help being grateful when it remembers that the beauty and the wonder of them may be accounted things not to enable us to exist , but gifts of love to make us JOYOUS!