Two Minutes of Totality

On April 8, 2024, Sarah Gonzalez drove eleven hours from Atlanta to a small field outside Dallas, Texas, just to stand in the path of a total solar eclipse. She had seen partial eclipses before, but veterans of totality had told her: nothing prepares you for the real thing. When the moon finally swallowed the sun and the corona blazed out in every direction, Sarah fell to her knees in the grass. Strangers around her were weeping. For two minutes and fourteen seconds, the ordinary sky became something unimaginably glorious.

Then it was over. The diamond ring of sunlight returned. People folded their chairs. Sarah sat in traffic for six hours driving home.

But she will tell you she is not the same person who left Atlanta. "I saw something I cannot unsee," she says. "Everything looks different now."

Peter, James, and John climbed that mountain expecting an ordinary day with their Rabbi. Instead, the glory of God broke through human skin, and the voice of the Almighty thundered from a cloud: "This is My beloved Son." Peter wanted to build shelters, to bottle the moment and stay forever. But Jesus led them back down into the valley, back to a world of suffering and need.

The mountain was never meant to be a destination. It was meant to be a revelation — a glimpse of who Jesus truly is — bright enough to sustain them through every dark valley still ahead.