A Twinkle in God’s Eye

I think there’s a skiff of white outside but I’m not sure. It’s still dark. When I came into the den with a Yorkie tucked under my left arm and a mug of soy milky frothy coffee in my right hand, before I bent to pick up dog toys scattered on the floor leftover from last evenings play, I stood at the window and looked out at the slumbering cul de sac where we live.

There’s something sweet about being the only one awake in the house and the neighbourhood.

The sidewalks and street seemed to sport a skiff of white, but not the grass—that’s what confused me. Maybe it’s just a hard frost, not snow.

I settle in on the sofa and wrap the sleepy Yorkie in a blanket and tuck him in the space beside me where he goes back to sleep. I sip coffee and turn my head to look out over the top of the window covering at stars in the clear night sky.

A few nights ago, when Gerry came home from an evening hike, he called me to the window.

“Look!” he said as he pointed toward the east. “You don’t often get to see the red planet glow like that.”

And sure enough, there was Mars and Venus was next to it. I was tired from caring for a puppy all day, not as interested as I wish I had been, and husband’s enthusiasm didn’t grab me. I wish it had.

Now, as I remember that missed moment I remember others, like the one I wrote about in The Presence of Absence when the tiny green frog showed me I was living distracted. I lean back, rest my head on the back of the sofa, gaze at the stars and speak to God.

And ponder love.

And something Pete Greig said in a Renovaré Book Club webinar I attended yesterday about God smiling.

And how I miss magical moments too often.

And how the longer I look up at the those stars the more of them there seem to be.

And how maybe that twinkle is coming from God’s eye as he smiles at this disheveled woman with a tiny sleeping dog on the sofa next to her sipping coffee and watching stars and thinking, again, about the wisdom of letting things go.

Canadian link.

US link.