Only Once in Forever

Halloween night, right at sunset, we were grilling brats for dinner. The kids were impatient to get outside to trick-or-treat; every 10 seconds they were demanding help for with this or that. The table needed to be set, I'm pretty sure that the phone rang too... But for just a few minutes my husband and I chose to be deaf to it all.

We ignored the kids, (I confess, I ignored them much more stubbornly than he did), the table, and the brats got a bit blackened. We were transfixed, frozen in place, watching the astounding art being painted in the sky. Unique curls of cloud caught fire ever so briefly. By the time I snatched my camera, they were mostly gone.  Fortunately, my husband was a faster snatcher than I was.

"I think life is staggering and we're just used to it. We all are like children no longer impressed with the gifts we're given - it's just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral."       Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, p. 58

I don't want to be so spoiled by the remarkable gifts God gives everyday that I become ungrateful. That sunset, with those clouds and those colors won't happen again, no matter how long this earth lasts. God unveiled that masterpiece only once, for a brief moment. I don't want to ever become so responsible, or important, or busy, that I forget what it is to be alive in this world.