The Morning the Eclipse Turned Strangers into a Congregation

On April 8, 2024, in a wide-open field outside Fredericksburg, Texas, three thousand strangers stood shoulder to shoulder, wearing cardboard glasses and clutching lawn chairs. They had driven from Houston, Dallas, even Chicago — all for four minutes and twenty seconds of totality.

When the moon finally swallowed the sun, something unscripted happened. The temperature dropped ten degrees in moments. Crickets began singing their evening song at 1:40 in the afternoon. Horses in a nearby pasture lay down as if for the night. And the humans — those three thousand strangers who had never shared a word — gasped in unison, then erupted into applause. Some wept. Some shouted. A woman near the back began singing the doxology, and dozens of voices she had never heard before joined her.

No one organized it. No one rehearsed it. The creation simply declared what it knew, and the people couldn't help but respond.

That is Psalm 98. "Let the rivers clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy before the Lord." The psalmist isn't using a figure of speech. He is describing something real — that all of creation recognizes its Maker, and when the Almighty reveals His glory, the only fitting response from every living thing is worship. The rivers know it. The hills know it. Even the crickets in a Texas field know it.

The question is whether we do.