There are moments when I long for an answer, clarity, inspiration, relief, or hope and receive nothing. Even in earnest seeking, eager anticipation, a proper posture, an open heart, a willing spirit—nothing.
Then there are moments when I receive an answer, clarity, inspiration, relief, and hope when I least expect it. Not seeking, not anticipating, yet a glimpse is given.
So what to conclude?
Honestly, nothing, other than the fact that this thing we call life, this yearning we carry inside of us, interacts with the divine in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend.
I am not saying to stop seeking, knocking, asking, etc., but you know what I mean. If we are being real, there really isn't much of a pattern when it comes to these kinds of things.
I sat beneath the stars, alone, quiet, void of distractions, a fire lit before me, nothing but the sound of crickets and wind in my ears, waiting, listening, silently calling out in my heart, gazing into the seemingly infinite cosmos.
Just show me a sign. Open my eyes. Give me a vision. Let me hear a voice. See a light. Something. Anything. Even just an inner knowing, a peace.
The fire burned low. I started to get chilled, so I turned on my flashlight and trudged back inside, not ready for sleep but eager for rest. Do you know the feeling? Wired and weary.
The next morning, under the same sky, I thought back on the stars that were visible the night before. Thousands of years ago we thought these to be holes in a firmament, a giant dome, the barrier between our world and Heaven.
We know them now to be burning balls of gas, some far away and some incredibly far away, a distance so vast that even the light, as fast as it travels, can take billions of years to reach the eyes of a person gazing from our Earth.
This means that some of the stars you see are actually ghosts, light that's finally made it to our neck of the universe from stars that breathed their last and in an explosion sent their dying light in our direction.
To be alive. To ponder the vastness of it all. To understand just a little more than our ancient ancestors about the sheer enormity of this plane of existence we inhabit is, in and out itself, a small answer, an inner peace, a sign.
Even light, traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second, sometimes has to patiently endure the journey to being seen, and that magnificence is subtle, yet all around us, enduring and complex.
Though the heavens didn't open up and a voice call out an answer, it did in a way. To be finite and ponder the infinite. To be human and wonder of the supernatural. To even be conscious—the universe thinking about itself, stardust breathing and contemplating—is truly an extraordinary experience.
Chase Butler
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