Dreaming dreams

I often feel that the thoughts I have upon first waking contain special insights.  I know my mind has been dreaming and sifting though impressions and forming conclusions around various key experiences got in the press of random events.

Random events.  A reader tried to catch me in a trap recently to challenge some things I said about believing in God.  Random events — ones that have no cause, or no evident cause.  Certainly life seems to be filled with things that have no meaning, things that are not worth notice.  The things that occur in a single day that one ignores are too numerous to count.  The whole creative activity of thought goes in a different direction — toward shaping meaning around a few chosen observations.

I bump shoulders with people in an elevator but don’t count them among my acquaintances.  Yet other encounters so fill my life with meaning as virtually to define who I am.  My parents, my husband, my child, my true friends — and are these not associations I chose?  Yet they are not.  They all have chance written in them.  Or “fate” or “destiny.”  But they do not have “me” written in them.  I did not create them.  I did not bring these things into being.

The activity of creative thought, of finding meaning in life, of discoverying a “shape,” a biography within one’s own life events is like what a novelist does in writing a story.  I am a character in my own story — even as I write much of the plot.  Yet I did not create myself, nor do I have control over what will befall me.

I can more easily envision myself as a character in God’s story — though I have a certain amount of free will to choose as I like.  I am — as will sound so familiar to novelists — a character who goes my own way.  How many novelists describe “creating” a character and then “watching” the character act, wondering before the reader ever sees the book what the character will “do”?

Perhaps we are God’s fictions!

PICTURE CREDIT CLICK

My Personal Angel

Do you believe that God watches out for you?

I was driving in rural North Carolina last summer.  I had just visited my eye doctor and needed an update to my glasses prescription.  So I handed over my glasses and wore my contact lenses exclusively for a week while the glasses were updated.

And during the week I drove to North Carolina for a short visit to family.  I was only about 35 miles from my destination when my eyes got really tired.  So I pulled over at the last large town and took the lenses out, rewet them, gave my eyes a gentle rub, and put the lenses back in.

Big mistake.  I couldn’t see very well at all!  Well, I thought that the blurriness would subside after a few blinks, so I got back on the road.  It was dark by now.  And as I drove further, I started wondering whether it wouldn’t be smart to turn around, get back to that town and find a hotel.  Only thing was, I had driven far enough in my blur that I was going to have as much trouble going back as I would going forward.  I honestly didn’t know what to do.  With my kid in the back seat, it was just her and me. I was getting worried.

I was thinking to myself that what I needed was another car that I could just follow.  It was that bad.  I was having trouble seeing my lane as we got farther into the country where the street lighting was real sparse. 

And that’s when another car happened along.  Usually people on this stretch of highway drive over the speed limit, which is bad enough in daylight since it’s a narrow two lane.  In the dark of night for a blurry eye’d driver it was a potential nightmare.  But then, out of the blue, I find myself behind a driver going 45 miles an hour.  What’s more, it was just the two of us.  For once, I didn’t have another car on my tail rushing me along.

I was sure that other driver would eventually speed up.  People often go a little slower when they first pull out into a highway and then come up to speed.  The posted speed limit was 55.  But the other driver stayed a steady 45 mph.  It was just slow enough and just fast enough for me to keep up and stay right behind him.

I just took it for the lifeline that it was, wondering when he would turn off and leave me alone again to manage as best I could.  But, I’ll be darned, my angel behind the wheel drove the entire 35 miles and turned off just a mile outside the little town I was trying to reach.  He took me all the way there, and when he finally turned we were in a 45 mph zone on the outskirts!  A half mile later the speed goes down to 35, and then you’re in town.

Don’t know about you, but I was sure someone was watching over me and my daughter.  My scientifically minded friends would say it was just a coincidence.  But a similar event has never happened to me along that stretch before or since — and moreover I “predicted” the event before it happened by wishing for the very thing I got.

I’m not saying an “angel” was driving the car, like a picture of something you’d see in a Hallmark card, I’m suggesting that God uses what we call coincidence to help us through life.

The person driving the car was just a slow driving person getting where he wanted to go.  He didn’t know that his actions affected anyone but himself.  Since he knew that road too (it’s a local kind of road), he might have wondered why I never passed him.  Most people are in a big hurry.  But he just drove steadily and I followed him like my life depended upon it.  Cause it did.

That’s how God works, I think.  When you’ve got the entire space/time continuum at your disposal you don’t need fantasy or special effects.  For God, ordinary “chance” happenings will do just fine.

For the Birds

Some of my reader-critics have fabulous websites.  May I recommend Dan’s site “Migrations” on the topic of biological science. 

While Dan takes exception to my political views, we have discovered that we are both at least pro-bird.

And I enjoin all my readers, regardless of your political beliefs, to care about birds and to be pro-bird like me.

I say this as a quip, but I mean it from my heart.  Nature is a doorway into understanding ourselves — for we are part of nature.