Gifts Come From Strange Places.

10:00 pm-My head is thumping like a 24 inch kick drum .

I take two strangely shaped prescription pain relievers with an 

impressive sounding name. After offering my legs as a source of 

heat to the red-headed love of my life everything goes wonderfully grey.

2:00 am-Awakening slowly from a dream of the barely lit truck stop

on the East side of Fort Wayne, I lay in the dark thinking of

everything and nothing in particular.

It’s been so many years since I lived in those wide lonely views

of the West. I never awaken any longer to the snow capped 

Cascades framing my view to the West. Nor have I smelled the morning dew 

on the sagebrush that rolls into the horizon of the Eastern Desert, 

the view dotted by the Juniper trees with their gnarled branches for more 

than twenty years and the painted hills. In a landscape like that, the immense size  

of the world and the palpable existence of divinity walk hand in hand.

But as I lay in the dark watching the colors of black, grey and navy

on the ceiling of my room, morphing with the movement of the

odd branch in the wind or car in the street I feel those same feelings

return that my beloved vistas brought when I was younger.

The utter loneliness of this moment brings a Western-sized peace. 

Even though I hear the breathing of someone next to me and the 

sounds of a world outside, I am as fulfilled as the night I slept under 

the stars on top of a desert mountain. 

We built a fire, listened to ZZ Top as loud as the batteries of my 

JC Penny boombox would permit, yelled into the night because 

no one was within 30 miles to complain and yet the cold silence 

laughed at us and remained as all encompassing as I had ever 

known it in my short 16 years.

Blaise Pascal said that all men’s troubles from not knowing how to 

sit still in one room. I don’t know how, but in my heart tonight I 

have found the vastness of the world still existing in one room 

and the peace of my Saviour making the darkness warm.