There's this common adage that God meets you exactly where you are. If you’re like me, you hear this and roll your concealer-caked eyes. I’m platinum blonde and six feet tall-----it’s not like I’m hard to find. He has yet to meet me in the pantry. Or in the school carline. Or in the ridiculously long Starbucks’ drive-thru because people order the stupidest drinks with oat milk and dragon fruit and sixteen different ingredients and just.give.me.my.damn.black.coffee.
My dog had an interaction with a raccoon the other day. I didn’t see the whole thing and am not sure what actually occurred, but I assume they weren’t having afternoon tea. I picked up my dog without thinking, and ever since then, I’ve reached the end of the internet researching rabies. My exposure is as follows: possible raccoon saliva transferred to Lucy’s fur and then transferred to a recent bleeding mosquito bite on my left arm. I’m giving you the short version of this---the longer version has consumed my life. OCD is a thief of time, and if rabies is incubating inside of my central nervous system, then I don’t have a whole lot of it left.
There's a story from nearly three years ago that I’ve recounted a few times after too many espresso martinis. Each retelling makes me cringe, as it sounds a bit cheesy—almost like a fantastical tale that might be better left untold. Yet, I continue to feel a strong urge to share it. So, feel free to cast those skeptical glances my way. I'm no stranger to the ‘ole eye roll---I once performed an entire Britney Spears’ dance routine in my wedding dress in front of some unimpressed senior citizens. Judge away. I love basketball. I’ve loved it since I was old enough to dribble the ball with my dad, waiting until after dinner when we could roll the portable hoop to the front of the driveway. We would take the train to see the Chicago Bulls and go to the NCAA tournaments to watch teams I had never even heard of, and I was completely enthralled. I remember the ’98 tournament when Bryce Drew and Valparaiso made their Cinderella run. I wore that t-shirt until holes formed. It now lives in a box in my closet---a moth-eaten memory.
Perhaps basketball distracts me from my overactive brain, or maybe I’m just drawn to it because I literally outgrew gymnastics and ballet slippers at age three. Either way, when basketball season is upon us, I consume myself with stats and offenses and strategies----and for a brief respite, I’m able to forget about rabid raccoons lurking in my backyard and all the scary, shitty things that happen to really good people, and perhaps, most of all, that the only certainty in this life is uncertainty. I’m not a superstitious person by nature, nor do I really believe in signs, but on March 6, 2022, I swear two flew right by me. “Mom, I just saw two cardinals on that fence post!” shouted Millie, which I know isn’t that strange of a thing to say, especially given how much she talks about everything, but for some reason, the most unusual sense of calm washed over me. I say unusual because if you know me, you know calm is not my natural state.
You see, I was on my way to drop off Millie at theater practice before I left for the last regular season Illini basketball game in Champaign, Illinois. There was a bit of frustration about the way the season was ending, as we had blown our chances for a conference title that once seemed within reach. We had one last, faint glimmer of hope: Wisconsin, the first-place team in the conference, would be the outright champions with a final win over Nebraska that day, and apologies to my friends who wear those silly corn hats, but no way was Nebraska pulling that off. Wisconsin was ranked tenth in the nation, Nebraska had not beaten a top ten team in almost a decade, and to add insult to injury, their leading scorer was out with an injury and their second-best player was ejected from the game. I remember checking the score before I left to take Millie to her practice, and not surprisingly, Wisconsin had around a ten-point lead in the second half.
But then---two red cardinals sitting side by side on a fence post. I once read somewhere, probably when I was scouring the internet for medical advice on brain-eating amoebas (they’d sure have their tiny little amoeba hands full with my brain), that seeing a cardinal is a sign from a loved one in Heaven. Now, I don’t usually put much stock into that stuff, but I do believe there are times in this life when the thin veil between Heaven and Earth becomes almost transparent, and the presence of something greater than ourselves is hard to deny. On this day, thoughts of my old friends Matt and Tony surfaced in my busy mind, and I smiled.
“We’re going to win the Big Ten Championship tonight,” I thought.
Moments later, in the theater parking lot, I glanced down at my phone for the score. And there it was. Nebraska had come back and won the game by one single, beautiful point.
Hear me out. I know that God has way more pressing matters than the outcome of some college basketball game, but “He meets you right where you are,” remember? No, in that moment it wasn’t just about the game; like maybe, just maybe, it was a quiet confirmation that my two basketball-loving friends who left this world long before they were supposed to, are at peace. That despite my lacking faith, He’s not given up on me yet.
There was a nervous, palpable energy that night in Champaign. I was on some low carb diet again but I ate my way through two jumbo pretzels and cheese while I clenched and unclenched my fists for forty minutes. The game was close. They were up, they were down, they were back up again. They won by two points. I’ll remember it forever.
We stormed the court once the buzzer sounded and chaos ensued. Shoulder to shoulder with every other sweaty fan in that building, I stopped momentarily and looked up into the empty stands. I found two seats that I knew weren’t actually empty---Matthew and Tony were just nearby.
And so was God. There, on a crowded court covered in confetti, He found me.
No comments:
Post a Comment