what dreams may come

When the kids were tiny and I was still in grad school, they had to spend several afternoons with a sitter each week. I would go and pick them up on my way home from school or work or whatever the schedule had for that day. In the fall, at that time of day, the sun was just setting as we came down the street toward home. Up the hill, across the railroad tracks, and back down the hill to home. At the railroad tracks, we were on the highest point in the area and as we crossed every evening, the sky was on fire directly in front of us. Everyday, I’d say, look guys, look at the colors Jesus painted. As time went by, my tiny ones would anticipate the painting, and when we crossed the tracks, would say the mantra. Often we’d circle around the cul-de-sac and drive back up the hill, turn around and cross the tracks again.
Two or three years ago we were driving down the road and Will had his head bent over staring out the window, up at the sky watching the clouds. He said, “Dad, the sky is so amazing, everyday it is different, we get a new sky everyday.” Of course we do Willby, it reminds us that God’s mercies are new every day. We get new mercies every morning, just like we get a new sky.

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This past winter I was sitting on the deck with a fire and reading The Divine Conspiracy. I was exactly where I needed to be while reading Dallas Willard’s discussion of Spirit. As I read about God speaking to Peter “out of the atmosphere”, or “out of thin air”, I stared up at that vastness with its gazillions of stars. I felt tiny, I had some new understanding of spirit and omnipresence. I felt the air out of which God spoke to Peter, and to Hagar in the wilderness. All around me. I breathed it in. Some say that prayer should be like breathing out and breathing in. My prayer didn’t have to go anywhere that night – I simply felt spirit and breathed the breath of God.

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The Perseid Meteor Shower began this week. Though there are still only a few to be seen each night, the sky show will continue to intensify until August 11 when it peaks and we begin flying back out of the goo from the Swift-Tuttle comet, which left this stuff in our path during the Civil War, around 1865. Each night this week I’ve spent some time out on the deck staring up long enough to catch 3 or 4 shooting stars. Lying there staring up, feeling the vastness and mystery, and stealing a glance at a rock, or speck of dust, or piece of metal, burning up from friction in our atmosphere, one can’t help but feel vulnerable. The very air that we breathe, that oft used metaphor for emptiness, is the stuff that envelopes us and protects us from cosmic projectiles. It is only through God’s great love that we are not consumed. Spirit God everywhere, in every molecule in every atom, electron, speaking from the heavens, ‘out of the atmosphere’, burning up the fiery darts before they can cause us harm.

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Tonight as I lie down (much too late), I close my eyes with the hope of new mercies, created while I sleep by a God who never slumbers. I grieve for those who can’t find sleep and who like Jeremiah have lost hope and deemed God a lost cause. I breathe a prayer to the God who fills my inmost being that also like Jeremiah, a glimmer of remembered faithfulness will be enough to hold to as they passionately wait, diligently seek, and quietly hope.
The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime and in the night,
His song shall be with me, a prayer to the God of my life.