The Skies Proclaim the Work of His Hands

With no cabin of my own to call home for the night, I climbed the steps from the hull to the open deck of the ferry and blinked as my eyes adjusted to the velvety black night. I could barely see where to step.

Freshly graduated from undergrad, I had been on the road for two months, staying in crowded, fluorescent-lit hostels across Europe so that I could witness the hands ticking off the passage of time at London’s famed Big Ben, stare into the stony eyes of the gargoyles perched atop Paris’s Notre Dame, and meander through Gaudi’s fanciful Barcelona playground Parc Güell. I had marveled at the handiwork of man as I traveled from there onto more neon cities across the continent—until they began to blur together like a hazy dream. Now, I found myself floating in the middle of nowhere. Or rather, floating somewhere in the middle of the Ionian Sea. Somewhere between Brindisi, Italy, where I’d boarded the ferry, and the mainland of Greece, where I planned to reunite with my family, who were already vacationing there. What I didn’t know, as the waves rocked the boat back and forth, was that I was also somewhere between my past and my future, my stable suburban American childhood and an adulthood stamped by expatriation. I walked over to a bench and lay down flat on my back, my travel-weary vertebrae resettling.

The bench was hard and cold in the offshore summer air. I breathed in and out, inhaling the distinctive rank of briny seawater and exhaling a certain tiredness that comes from living out of a backpack. As I listened to the water splash rhythmically against the side of the boat, tranquility “As it said in Psalm 19:1 of the little washed over pink pocket Bible I carried on my me. journey, ‘The heavens declare the The vast glory of God; the skies proclaim expanse of sky stretched over the work of His hands.’” the shoreless sea. My eyes took in the nebulous night, and stars began to pierce the darkness. At first, I could only see the brightest celestial bodies, but in time I began to connect the dots, and the familiar constellations became visible. As my pupils dilated further, I saw more and more stars splash across the night sky. What had at first appeared blindingly dark now revealed itself to be dazzling with light. As it said in Psalm 19:1 of the little pink pocket Bible I carried on my journey, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.” I sat up. I had never seen so many stars in my life! Away from the light pollution of cities and suburbs, I realized the countless stars foretold in the textbooks and planetariums of my youth had been blazing overhead all along. I walked over to the side of the boat, and I looked out toward the inky Ionian to discover the stars drenching the vault of the sky, from north to south and east

Stephanie Nikolopoulos

And I thought about my father.

Born on an olive grove in the Peloponnesus, in mainland Greece, my father had gone to sea at seventeen years old. Starting as a cook’s assistant, he worked his way up the ranks of the shipping industry, at last becoming a captain himself. He had regaled me with stories of geisha in Japan, tribes along the piranha-infested Amazon River, and the streets of India when I was a child, inspiring and encouraging me to set off on my own adventures.

He didn’t return to land to build a home and family of his own until he was nearly forty, and now I wondered what his life at sea, the life between ports, must’ve truly been like. I knew he could navigate by the position of the stars, but he had never told me just how dark it got out at sea and how it was only out in that darkness that you could truly see the light of the stars.

I was following in my father’s footsteps now, traveling from city to city, living out adventures that would give me my own stories as a woman on the road. I didn’t yet realize that the memories I would hold dear weren’t the tourist attractions but the

“My Heavenly Father had placed each star in the sky like pushpins in an elusive map to a destination I was still yearning to reach.”

self-discovery that comes from the journey itself. I didn’t know that I would vividly remember the night on the boat, but that I’d barely be able to recall the Eiffel Tower or St. Peter’s Basilica.

A few years after I had backpacked across Europe, when as a struggling writer in my mid-twenties I was still living back at my childhood home, my father announced he was returning to live in his homeland. My mother, who was not Greek, believed that as a Christian she was duty-bound to follow her husband to this foreign land. My younger sister and brother would expatriate soon after. I stayed behind. I was an adult. An independent woman. I was not tethered to anyone or any place.

Even as I planted my feet on familiar land, I felt lost at sea. Although we were a family that embraced travel and encouraged each other’s solo journeys, we were also an immigrant family that knew the pain of not having nearby relatives and so grew up talking fervently of staying close together even as we got older. Now, we were older. And now I felt alone and abandoned. Worse yet, I felt ashamed that although I was independent enough to travel internationally on my own, I now felt adrift without my family in my homeland. My outlook grew dimmer.

I thought of my Father.

I remembered the stars from that night at sea when I was caught between two destinations. Though now I could see only a few distant stars shining high above the streetlamps of New Jersey, they were the selfsame stars my family an ocean away could see on the shores of Greece. My Heavenly Father had placed each star in the sky like pushpins in an elusive map to a destination I was still yearning to reach.

My vision was still adjusting to the Way, the Light.