True Story

I was drifting precariously between wakefulness and sleep. The dark tugged at my eyelids heavily. Thump. “Did you hear that?” I asked. Natalie knows the strange house sounds better than I do. “Do you know what it was?” She didn’t. She did have concerning theories about windows opening. They made me wish I was still asleep. Sleep… Yes… No… Yes… We had been what seemed like hours getting Nathan to sleep. It was my turn. I tried to listen for more sounds. Any hints that I should really be concerned. Not that it makes a difference, I would have to go check things out. But I should wake up first.
The sound of glass breaking is very singular and unique. It is instant and sharp, and yet it lingers on the air. In my groggy state I couldn’t decipher exactly where the shatter happened, but there was no question what it was, glass. Pane glass. The transition from mostly asleep to adrenaline pumped and ready to tear the arms off of whatever it was I was sure was going to come through the bedroom door was instant. It was faster than instant. I shouted, no, bellowed, hoping through some instinct to scare the demon-driven monster away. The dog, outside was barking frantically. His deep, protective bark. I scramble through my drawer for the gun. It wasn’t there. But Natalie assures me it is. She turns on the light, I find the gun, and my AAA powered LED penlight. It was about as likely to penetrate the dark as a pocket knife is to conquer the Amazonian jungle. But I delved in undaunted. I had no choice.

There is something about having others to protect that makes you brave. I made my way from room to room checking the doors and windows. Down the stairs. I was breathing hard. No glass anywhere. The dog was still barking like mad. Maybe I missed something upstairs. My family was still upstairs. I scrambled up the stairs.

Walmart sells these rolls of padded double-sided sticky-tape. You use them to attach things to the wall. Things like mirror tiles. Said mirror tiles look particularly attractive when placed appropriately in small spaces, like our upstairs bath. I didn’t notice a warranty of any type on the packaging when I bought the tape, but I kind of expected it to last a while. But, failing that, I was left with one question. Why, out of 1440 minutes in a day, did it have to fail in the middle of the night?

The blue light of my LED flashlight cast eerie reflections on the bathroom wall off of the hundreds of glass-mirror shards on the tile floor. On the wall, one of the middle mirror-tiles was missing, leaving a gap. The relief washed over me slowly, though my heart was still pumping. The dog continued lapping around the house bellowing. Natalie came up. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. I hugged her. We both had the same thought at the same time. All the noise, the glass breaking, the yelling, the shuffling and thumping, surely Nathan would have woken, after all the time trying to get him asleep. We looked in the bedroom, and there he lay, sleeping peacefully, as if he knew everything was alright the whole time.

Providential Poetry

Every morning I wake up, as my wife would say, early. She is an aficionado of sleep. But some mornings it is all I can do to keep from pulling her out of bed, pressing her face against the window, and exclaiming with more enthusiasm than a five year old on fruit loops, "Look, look, it did it again!" For there in the morning horizon, despite every impossibility, is the bright burning orb, the sun.

What are the odds, in all the universe, that this ball we live in, as it rotates around the sun, wouldn't get slightly off its axis, or a couple inches too close? Imagine, if that happened, and something as simple happened as all the spiders in the world dying. Then fly and mosquito populations skyrocket unhampered, disease runs rampant through not only cities, but the country. The food supply is destroyed. But that is the least of our worries, for why would the world only miss by a few inches?

What reason do we have, other than it hasn't happened yet, to believe the earth won't go careening one of these days into outer space, bouncing off the other planets like a pinball? This is the divine providence of a loving, personal God, that despite infinite and impossible odds, the universe is held in order. The sun, as it were , rises. The moon holds the tides and releases them. The gas in our cars continues to combust. Food continues to nourish, and our bodies continue to process it. Why? Because the cells all are working together? No, because God is daily, moment by moment, breathing the command that it be so.

I think this is the essence of poetry and beauty. The world, despite all inclinations to go wrong, goes right. We could end up anywhere, yet here we are, where we are supposed to be.