In some of those moments when my belief is steady, and I'm out walking the dog after dark, and I glance up into the sky, I imagine God reaching into a sack and pulling out a handful of stars to plant across the night sky, much like farmers of old would scatter corn in a freshly plowed field. Except the stars, unlike the corn, were planted there to draw our eyes upward when otherwise we would overlook, question, or even actively deny His existence, because who can challenge such a notion as God while contemplating the stars in their field?
But one mid-July night, I received a call telling me that my seriously ill mother had been rushed to the hospital and was in bad shape. Six months earlier she had been diagnosed with a terminal recurrence of cancer and we knew that she could go at any time. As my husband and I quickly gathered our things and raced out the door to the car, I barely took note of the clear, summer sky sprinkled with those heavenly reminders of something vast and timeless and greater than my own grievous but personal trials. My eyes, though open, were focused inward on my pain at the thought of losing my mother and toward a future that seemed dark and empty.
With my husband at the wheel I worried that we might not make it to the hospital, an hour away in another city, in time. I thought of the still unfinished business between my mother and me even though we both knew her body was winding down, and I lamented my procrastination. I contemplated what my life might be like without my mother and, at nearly fifty years old and with my father still in vigorous, good health, I felt like a child about to be abandoned and left all alone in the world.
As my mind tentatively considered the possibility that she would be gone by morning, or maybe even before we got there, my gaze out the window of our speeding car was brought back to the moment by the twinkling light of a thousand – no, a million! – stars nestled in the knee-high crops of corn to the south of the highway. At first my brain, so far away in thoughts of death and emptiness, could not make sense of the image my eyes beheld. But slowly, as the delicate, soft, sparkle of the fields continued, I began to comprehend that the fields were aglow with the sweet, brief flashes of fireflies seeking love in the night. There were so many of them it was as if the sky had lowered itself like a blanket over the green, silent bed of fields.
For the next fifteen miles I was consumed with the serendipitous nature of such a wondrous sight and struck wordless at the contrast between the bright, cheerful beauty of that spectacle and the sad nature of the journey I was on. I felt oddly comforted and soothed by those fireflies and couldn’t help but smile at the realization that somehow on one still, quiet July night they all thought to signal potential mates at the same time in the fields on the side of that lonely highway.
My mother rallied and did not die that night or even that year although she was gone within eighteen months. We had time to finish some of our unspoken thoughts and feelings with each other and while the words themselves still occasionally escaped me, I had ample opportunities to express my depth of emotion the way so many of us do, by way of deeds such as home cooked meals, freshly laundered bedding, and bedside companionship as she slowly gave up her grip on this life in anticipation of the next.
But that night, so bowed down under the weight of my mother’s impending death that I could not look up, God settled the stars onto the fields around me in the form of fireflies, a silent reminder that His universe is beautiful, vast and goes on in ways we humans can’t begin to comprehend. Those small, winged creatures who wear their hearts on their sleeves (or their abdomen as it were) lit up the ground with their hopeful, trusting search for love and cast a warm, soft glow over my dark thoughts and emotions.
It gave me great comfort to know that from then on, memories of my mother would forever be connected to that magical occurrence that night, when the corn fields twinkled like the stars in the sky.
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