The Key

I held it out in front of me in one hand turning it over and over. The weight of it seemed heavier than I expected. It was a small key, and as I brushed the dirt away from it, a delicate tracing of ivy and vines became clear at the top. The key itself looked like it belong to a long lost door to a forgotten world and considering that it was stuck in the grass of some small town elementary school I found myself wondering what it was supposed to open.

I tucked the little key into my pocket, and later placed it on a key chain. I carried it around with me for over 10 years, trying it occassionally in antique store finds with rusty old locks that looked about the right size. I once even ventured to put it into a gate lock at a house that had been around long enough that it looked like it belonged. All the while the key in my pocket carried an energy of searching for something...so I kept my eyes open.

Like most things alive with only hope and belief, the strength of the keys whimsical entrance into my life faded from mind and with it the sense of searching to find home faded from my pocket until one day the key found it's way into my jewelry box instead of every lock I passed. It sat there untouched for 6 more years until one night in my living room it came up in an unexpected conversation.

"I dreamed once of a woman dressed in white," I told my mother, "I dreamed of her so much that she scared me. One day driving to Grandma's I swear I saw her on the side of the road. So I told Grandma."

My grandmother was the sort to believe a spirit on the side of the road was not only normal but expected. A trace of Cherokee blood trickled through her and it kept her aligned to things I had only just begun to understand at the age of 16 when I passed that hollow woman in white.

"You'll just keep seeing her...that's what Grandma said... so you might as well stop and talk to her." I said in my best Grandma voice. My mother seemed not at all suprised by my story or my grandmother's answer or my strange encounter...so I continued. "So I did. And she just walked slowly in front of my car. So I drove behind her for over 5 miles from the river to the middle of town and then parked my car and followed her around the chain link fence that she walked through at the elementary school until she took me to the corner with the brick wall. The wind came up and the it danced around me like a chapter in the The Secret Garden and there on the ground was a key."

I described the key upstairs, I knew it by heart. And my mother listened intently while I talked about how I felt like I had to carry it around forever and how I never saw the woman in white again.

"I know that key," my mother said with a grin, "it opens the door to your great grandmother's house." A house long since torn down, but which would have at the time been standing alone and vacant. "I wonder what you would have found if you went in."

3 Times 3

When I was first converting to Christianity, God stalked me. God was everywhere. Strangers talked to me, quotes found me in books, words haunted me from movies, signs feel down in front of me, it rained everyday angels and there was no denying that God was part of everything. I noticed God in everything, despite trying hard not to see him.

Now, it's been awhile. I find myself searching for God in the little things and although I find him there always I find myself also wondering if he wouldn't have been there if I wasn't looking so hard. It's that old Pagan in me. There's always going to be a little doubt.

Thursday it was a trying day. But, at some point during my day I sat down to watch the RR Show like I do every day and there was this Robin somebody or other who used to be (or maybe still is) on Good Morning America talking about a book she wrote after surviving cancer. She talked about her eighth rule which she added after she won her battle. The rule? "Make your messes into messages!"

I had an "ah ha" moment. Ok God, I hear you. I've been praying pretty hard about this writing thing... but I hear you now. I'll take this mess and find a way to make it into a message. Thanks Robin somebody or other for carrying God's message on to national television for me, I thought outloud in front of my daughter who looked at me like I was crazy.

But, the day was still long and hard and I felt pretty alone in it. I mean who listens the first time God talks to them... even people in the bible sometimes had to be told things 3 or 5 or 532 times. So I didn't feel bad when later I looked up while preparing dinner to hear Maria Shriver on Oprah talking about I don't know what and about how the I don't know what was her attempt to get women "to realize they are the leaders they are looking for". Ok God, I was listening the first time I was just making dinner. I chuckled to myself. I can do this. I feel renewed. I am...

What? The baby slipped while I was bathing her and now she's got a cut lip... I'm a horrible mother. Ten minutes changes everything and I am swept back from "enlightened" to beating myself up over a stupid mistake that the baby didn't even care I made.

So I sit down at the computer and I click through some blogs I follow after the baby went to bed and someone in one of my favorite blogs is talking about a book she is reading and how the person in the book wrote a little note to God on a postage note and the very next day she found a way to handle a situation she didn't know how to handle.

The person who wrote the blog started the blog by talking about how they didn't even really believe in God but ended the blog talking about how they wanted to use the blog they had written as a way to ask God to help them in the same way.

So it was decided. I mean it was already decided... I was just stalling.

A book. Yes God I hear you. I'll start writing it tomorrow. I'll set aside the fun project I was distracting myself with...because I hear you in the little things... someone (like the person who wrote that blog) is being stalked right now... and I think it's my turn to be the little thing they notice.

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