The Answer Hung In The Sky
The other night I went home a little later than usual. There was a lot of stuff running through my mind as I made the thirty mile drive home. You know how it is. You are tired. The day did not go so well. You replay, blow by blow, the events of the day while trying to focus on the road. All you are interested in is avoiding a collision with an oncoming vehicle and how many more miles it is until you get home. My mind raced. My body kept on telling me how tired I was. I could remember nothing but frustration. Everything piles up in your head. You think of what you should have done and lament those things you should not have done. It was as though my life consisted of an unfinished sentence. It started out, “I cannot understand for the life of me what today was all about…” After the but, the words would not come. It was as if this day had no meaning, no purpose. I know it did and I know better than to think like that, but when you are the honored guest at a pity party, your mind just does not think correctly.
The mind wanders and begins to think about tomorrow before it even gets here. I do believe that is called worry. Right or wrong or indifferent, we tend to worry. We begin building a mental picture. The picture is as plain as a portrait on the wall. Confused and uneasy about one day makes us build a mental image of exactly what we do not want to see happen the next. And then we begin to live tomorrow point by point as the picture describes before tomorrow even gets here.
I doubt very seriously that any of us have ever truly escaped this experience. It is real, we have to deal with such things, it is human nature and rarely does one escape it. Some live in it daily while others of us only visit it occasionally. But, we all experience our unanswered questions.
Needless to say, I got home, parked my pickup and headed into the house. It was late. It was dark and as I stepped onto the front porch, I was greeted my a loving and friendly “meow” from Miss Dutchess, my psychotic cat. She had to take a moment to leap from her perch and give me my daily cat scan.
I went into the house, made my normal pile of mail and headed for the living room. I checked out the TV, realized there was nothing I wanted to see there and headed up stairs. As I reached the top step, something outside the window caught my eye. The stair well was dark and I hadn’t even turned the light on. Since the stairway opens into the study and two walls of the study are glass, it provides a perfect and beautiful view of the Northern and Western sky. It was the first time I had actually noticed just how dark it was outside. Usually there is light from the moon and you can see the horse grazing in the pasture below. But, not this night. There was just darkness. Had it not been for the night light on the shop, I could have seen nothing at all.
That is when it hit me! There hanging in the Southwestern sky was a trace of the moon. It as actually less than a quarter moon. There was a little thin strip of light… so thin that instead of the light from it being white, it was a pale pumpkin orange. You couldn’t even see the contour of the other part of the moon. All you could see was the small orange glow of what looked like a huge comma in the sky. “What is that about”, I asked myself? I paused at the last step of the stairway for the longest time. Slowly and quietly, as if to slip up on it and keep it from running away, I moved to the top floor and over toward the window. I fixed my gaze toward the huge comma poking its way through the darkness. My life stood still. My gripes, my moans, all of my woes went silent. God was speaking to me in that picture. It was as if He was finishing the sentence in my head. “I cannot understand for the life of me what today was all about…” It was as if God was saying to me, “You may not understand for the life of you what today was all about, but one thing you should know and always remember is, I AM STILL IN CONTROL OF IT!
Well, by now you might think I am as loony as a tune, but from that moment on, my day changed. I had spent the whole day focused on me and what was going on in my little insignificant world. I had only seen the woes, the griefs, and the pressures. That morning I had walked out across the water and by that evening I was up to my ears in it, sinking quickly. But now, God had lifted me up reassuring me that He could always fill in the sentence that defined the purpose and meaning of my life when there seemed to be no other explanation.
This morning I stepped onto the water again and started sinking before it even got good daylight. The sentence flashed in my head again and God put the comma in my sentence once again before I could even write it.
The next time you feel hopeless and your life has more questions than answers, perhaps you should take a moment and let God have the keyboard. He can put a comma where it belongs and make your sentence make a lot more sense.