I was all set to write a piece about finding grace in the quietness of things, but the weather keeps changing on me.

Up till, oh, about lunchtime Friday, we were having the same sort of subdued fall that's been mostly the case this year: trees almost tentative in their turning, grey skies, quiet light. This dull weather has been just fine with me; I find it quiet, not depressing. Rather restful, in fact. Restful is nice because my children (who can quarrel over so much else) have generously shared with me the virus they brought home from school. A little quiet grey is appropriate for a person with a head cold, even at Thanksgiving.

But no--at noon Friday, the sky cleared and became that intensely brilliant blue you only see in fall or on some extraordinary winter days: a deep clear compelling blue like a trumpet call. And the trees that seemed dull before flared up into their fall colours, golds and scarlets and deep orange. It looked almost as though the sun was striking fire from them, and from the last of the fall garden flowers. Asters--this year, they've been an astonishing deep true-episcopal purple--sprang out under the light, glowing dark amethyst. There were even some last-minute dandelions. And the grass glowed with living light.

All this beauty and brilliance his would usually cheer me up, but I was too befuddled, too thick in the head with virus and tiredness. I didn't want to be exalted; I wanted to wallow to bed with a good book and a cup of tea--but there was too much to do.

It did occur to me, comfortingly: God's glory is always there, just as this deep clear sky is always there. And if sometimes I can't see it from where I stand, God probably understands that, being about my path and my ways, and understanding that sometimes a person has a cold in the head and is incapable of appreciating God's glory. That doesn't diminish the glory one bit, any more than my inability to be struck cross-eyed by all this beauty puts any dimness on the beauty itself. My incapacity is my problem, not God's or the landscape's.

Nonetheless, even if all I could do, staring into this stunning sky, was to sneeze and wish for a hot lemon-and-honey, I could still manage to appreciate *something*. I don't have to be so focussed on the state of my nasal passages that I fail to give thanks altogether. Okay, I couldn't appreciate the landscape. But it did occur to me, last night as I was starting a bath, that I could be profoundly grateful for a tub of hot water--could think what it would be like for someone cold, in exile, dirty and discouraged, to curl up in a hot bath. I could think of what my sisters on the other side of the world have to go through, finding sources of water and hauling it the hard way. I can think of the great gift of pure water I have, knowing that children are dying for want of it.

Being out of commission may make a person incapable of jumping up and down and hollering "Glory hallelujah!" There are times when saying those words--or saying "I count it all joy"--is just plain fakery and an insult to the state we find ourselves in. There is a time to rejoice and a time to refrain from rejoicing.

But a person can always find something to give thanks about, unless a person's nose is so firmly buried in her navel that she's not paying any attention whatsoever. It's always possible to raise your head and to look around you with some alertness, some openness, and some willingness to love, and thereby find some sort of gift of God, however small and quiet. Maybe small and quiet is what you need to receive most right now, just as what I needed isn't a glorious fall landscape but something more subdued and restful. Nothing wrong with that, I believe, so long as you leave yourself open to the glory that you can take in--even the glory of the very ordinary--and to the hope and possibility of the greater Glory to come.

Those were comforting thoughts. I hope I'm not just making excuses, although that's always a possibility. If I can't always appreciate God as I should, I hope God knows that I know that and don't like it in myself. But sometimes, all you can do isn't really enough, and you know it, and have to trust to grace and mercy for the rest.

This morning, the sky is once again overcast, and the colours are quieter, deeper, and perhaps stronger. The beauty's still there: both yesterday's beauty, veiled only for the moment, and today's beauty, which is kinder to tired people with colds. The two coexist. But this beauty I can can give real thanks for, most gratefully.