Posted in Life

“I was almost there”

Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash

The water felt wonderful as I stepped in. It felt as nice as I thought it would as I pushed off and glided through the water just a few inches from the bottom of the pool. Ribbons of sunlight made their way to the bottom of the pool as I blew out bubbles and sank closer to the hard pool surface below. I felt so relaxed as I floated along.

Just when I thought I had reached the far wall of the pool, I reached out and touched…nothing. The wall wasn’t there. So I reached out and brought my arms to my side, pushing myself forward into the blurry blue beyond. As I gently cut through the water, bursts of green and violet appeared as though someone were rinsing out a paintbrush. I drifted through clouds of color, no longer able to see the sunlight above or the bottom below.

Suddenly, it was as if a rainbow had exploded in the water. Colors were everywhere. I swam toward the teal, then the oranges, the indigo, and then the bright blue. I felt like I was trapped in a kaleidoscope, tumbling through every color and shape I ever knew. Up and down meant nothing. I reached towards the red, backed into the yellow, spun through the green, crawled along the blues.

I wanted to stay here forever. I felt something pulling at me, pulling backwards, pulling me away from this buffet of color. I tried to push the hands away. My lungs suddenly filled with air. I saw the sky, clouds, faces above me. “Are you OK?”

Reluctantly, I said, “Yes, I feel fine.” I laid there and said, “Am I OK?”

“We think you were down there for an hour. If the pool guy hadn’t seen you down there, you’d be…gone.”

I smiled. “No. I was almost there.”

Posted in Stories

The wrong color

A watermelon that has a red rind, green inside with white seeds to spit out.

A white Oreo cookie with dark chocolate cream filling.

Coffee that is light, and the half-and-half is a deep ebony hue.

White chocolate ice cream with dark vanilla sauce drizzled on top.

Black popcorn.

A green hotdog.

A light hamburger with a very dark bun.

Dark brown whipped cream.

Blue gold.

A stoplight where green means stop, red means go.

A black sun.

A green carrot.

Black instead of the “whites of your eyes.”

Recipes that call for egg blacks.

A blue tomato.

Orange lettuce.

A white clerical shirt with a black insert.

Yellow blueberries.

A whole mouth of black teeth.

A green orange.

Posted in joy, Life, listening

A spontaneous smile

jennifer-pallian-173714
Yeah, these guys make me smile, too. Photo by Jennifer Pallian on Unsplash

It was right in the middle of a song on Sunday morning. The praise team was smaller than usual, just a couple of voices, but they produced a moment that still echoes in my mind. I don’t remember what the song was, but at one moment, when the two voices –one male, one female — harmonized, it lifted my heart, brought a spontaneous smile to my face, and made me stop and marvel at the beauty of that moment.

Eight days later, I am still thinking about that moment. There was another such moment this morning when, as turned the corner on my way to work and the pre-sunrise colors in the sky took my breath away and made me smile. In the dim morning light, my phone’s camera just wouldn’t capture the colors to preserve that moment, so I can’t even share it with you. Or when I got back home tonight and my two-year-old grandson saw me and shouted, “You came back!” How could I not smile at that?

I am grateful that God sprinkles these little moments into my day from time to time. Sometimes you smile because you have to. Or because you don’t want to cry. But sometimes you just can’t help it.