Missing the Moment's Masterpiece

We love the rain in San Diego. 

We cherish the anomaly of clouds and dark skies in this else wise sun-saturated terrain.  

We relish the promise of parched creek beds awakening, and desert blooms, greedy, drinking their fill.

We love the rain in San Diego for the respite it offers from Southern California living--running, going, doing, traveling on freeways that take us across the world and back in a day.

Finally, we can stop.  We have to, we tell ourselves.  After all, it is raining.

Time to curl up under a blanket and read, snuggle with hot chocolate culled from dried out packages tucked away for such a time as this. 

We love the rain in San Diego, because we know it will not last.

 
Most likely, it will not yet have soaked our flower beds before that gold orb flashes bright and warm, beckoning us to get up, get busy, stop wasting valuable time.
 
So we rise, plans aplenty, tasks on our to-do lists that can no longer wait.

I read a newspaper story yesterday about Wilson Bentley a Vermont farmer in the 20th century, who spent his entire life fascinated with snowflakes.  Attaching a microscope to a large camera, he snapped pictures by the dozens, discovering and diagramming the icy crystals' intricate details.   His friends and family thought Bentley a dreamer, his hobby of no practical use.  Just before he died, he published his book of pictures and little known facts, eager to share what he called the miracles of beauty that had enveloped his life.

Wilson Bentley, the dreamer, is the one who discovered that there really are no two snowflakes alike, each one a masterpiece...and that when one melts, that particular work of art is gone forever.

Maslow said that the ability to live in the present moment is a sign of mental wholeness... and I wonder at the insanity that drives me always to live for what is to come, rather than the now.

How many masterpieces have I missed today?

This is the day the Lord has made.  

The word for day comes from the root word, "hot."

Get it while it's hot...strike while the iron's hot...hot off the press...hot topic...

In other words...the now.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

The word for rejoice is akin to tremble.  To be glad akin to jumping for joy.

Because of who He is...every breath we take is eternity in the making.

Every glance of my eye...quickening of my heart...taste on my tongue...sound in my ears...touch of my fingers...scent in the air...

All works of art, fashioned by the One who holds the world together by His power and calls into being that which was not.

The rain that so quickly flees from us here in San Diego reminds us that we can, indeed that we must stop everything at times and embrace what is right here, right now...

And when we do, perhaps tremble...or jump for joy--

...before the sun returns, and the masterpiece of the moment has eluded us once again.