When I was growing up I remember the unbridled joy of stringing Christmas lights around our apartment window. Oh it made me so happy! When I got married and we bought our house I was so excited to have lights on our roof. I have discovered as I have gotten older that anytime I have been silently judgy it has come back to bite me. In this case it was about people leaving their Christmas lights up year round. I was NEVER going to do that! Well, the Christmas lights people seemed eager to put them up but then became mysteriously unavailable to come and take them down. My husband, who is a wonderful man, certainly would not do it (he avoids any type of manual labor) and so they just sort of stayed. Epiphany passed, then Easter came followed by Pentecost, I broke my shoulder, then suddenly it was summer. And still the lights remained on our roof. I began to get used to feeling embarrassed and found myself thinking at least we’d save money not having to have someone hang them this coming Christmas. Recently we switched back to satellite for our TV. It has better reception than it did in its infancy and it has made our internet faster since it frees up the line. So there I was standing outside the front of our home signing a waver about “an act of God” on this satellite dish when an unexplained mighty gust of wind came through — in JULY — and took our all lights down one by one from the left to the right of our house. It was as if a giant hand had simply peeled them all off and laid them delicately upon the flagstones. Not one was broken. I gaped in astonishment and frankly the cable guy freaked. He kept saying, “I wasn’t anywhere NEAR them!” and I knew that he wasn’t. The English poet Philip James Bailey wrote:
“Let each man think himself an act of God, His mind a thought, his life a breath of God; And let each try, by great thoughts and good deeds, To show the most of Heaven he hath in him.”
I know I should go out there, retrieve our lights, and put them away properly in a box; I just keep hoping my husband will do it. Now THAT would be a real act of God! 😉
