That “MANGONUI is one of the jewels of the Far North,” I am reading in a column in our local newspaper. The town is famous for many things, it says, also for its “stunning picture-postcards views.”

IT IS A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN MANGONUI.

Not long before reading this in the paper, I visited Mangonui. I remember a very heavy downpour, that I did not take any pictures in spite of having two cameras on me, and that it was a day without sunshine. (You know what I mean.) It was a day to sit in the restaurants reading the paper and drinking coffee.

Days without sunshine remind me always of lives, people, without the “Sun of Righteousness,” the Lord Jesus Christ. (Malachi 4:2) In Psalm 84:11 it says, “For the LORD God is our  sun and our shield.” Do you know the Lord Jesus Christ, the “Sun of Righteousness?”

Just as Mangonui becomes a jewel (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” – Genesis 1:1) in the sunshine, so people who know the Lord Jesus Christ, the “Sun of Righteousness,” become jewels, as it says in Zechariah 9:16, “They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown.” The Apostle Paul says in Philippians 4:1 about the Philippians, “…, for you are my joy and the crown I receive for my work.”