Jeweled Autumn Moments

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

Sometimes…

Life collects like dustbunny clouds under the bed.

Skies open, rain pours, street lights pool romantically on wet pavement.

Even then…Autumn dazzles,

Capturing imagination

With jeweled moments…

Like once-buried seashells washed up in lace-edged waters…

Like hidden gifts from the Artist’s hand

- His initials, as love notes carved on a tree, secretly painted on canvas -

Just waiting for me to uncover them.

  

There, between the sumac and the maple…

Here, among sky-high branches fluttering leaves that hang like bells, tinkling on the breeze…

Today, between stood-upside-down-paintbrush trees dipped in dripping colors of radiance…

Now... following behind a canary-yellow school bus that has just pulled front in line…

Another time, I might have tapped my steering wheel with impatience.  Groaned out loud at the vehicle ahead making me stop and wait every 10 feet…with urgent places to go, no time for tortoise inconvenience.

But this day, sunlit sky suddenly opening from heaven’s windows, I’m just out to soak in colors vibrant along countryside roads… and up beside weathered covered bridges… and out around blue-watered inlets shining their white sapphire lights en pointe.  I welcome time when the car behind isn’t pushing me ahead, and I can fill to brim with this riotous palette. Drive under sudden showers of falling gold and music on the air.

Even the yellow of this bus glows deeper on this day, trail-dancing skitters of leaves behind its wheels, zipping jump-rope joy over me. Steel stop sign arms pop out from the bus sides, crimson caution flashes…

And God opens up a living diorama before me…

Three tiny figures, plaid and cream and apple-red-jacketed, spill out…book bags bouncing behind them.  A golden retriever is ecstatic, circle-dancing around the feet of one now.  I watch as a second runs flying into a male figure’s arms, there by the garage, and he scoops her high and close to his chest.  Sending laughing leaf piles up around them. The third is heading

for the front door now, but as the                                                                                                 bus doors clank to close, all four turn and wave…         a tender salute… to the bus driver and crew…     gaiety and afternoon light warming this                  fragile-second scene…

And in this simple moment, I feel like I have just peeked in on a sliver in time of this unknown family’s story…

With photographic eye…like Norman Rockwell, with his paints.

With a wish to savor…

With a feeling of sacred gift in that scene…

That fills my eyes… lights my smile.

Because bumping into someone else’s lightpost moment, sharing in it somehow,  is never just coincidence…

but part of His Story that makes us all one with Him…

In that split second, it is just a lovely touch in rainbow array…

But later, as I take it out and hold splayed again like a succession of photos in animation, I see once more…

The story of the Father, waiting expectantly, for homecoming.

To receive us flying to his arms, hold us close, lift us up… pour gold at our feet.

And sometimes... how we may get to be the “bus driver” who helps carry others to that warm and waiting spot where the cares of the day are sent flying off, like weighty book bags left behind… and light and family and hope are bursting from within.

Where God’s grandeur is ever on parade.

And everyone has eyes to see His diamond miracles.

 

 

 

©   Pam Depoyan

 

Have you an autumn jewel in your hand today? 

I’d love to hear about it…

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With: Multitudes on Monday counting blessings with this blogging community, thankful for God’s gifts all around us, especially radiant with his Grandeur in Autumn!  For how He puts us in moments and opens our eyes to see the jewels hidden there.

    

     

photos:  http://www.fotosearch.com

 

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