#36- Ghost Post
by Cory MacNeil

It's three thirty a.m and I'm sitting in the parking lot of Grace Fellowship Church in Latham, waiting to pick my oldest daughter up from a field trip to Pennsylvania.  Most of the other cars have their lights off.  A couple have parking lights on (presumably new car owners who don't want to incur dents or a full on collision).  A few are texting.  One lady has her interior lights on (probably reading my blog....or not.  Ooops!  The bus just arrived.  Be back in a few.

I've decided to write this morning, because I believe I'm experiencing something holy.  This morning I'm part of a group in process.  Many times, life seems circular and repetitive.  Today it feels linear....like this is all going somewhere.  It's not that it's not going forward all the time, it just doesn't feel that way sometimes.  Sometimes it's just plain hard.

The moment the bus pulls in is always a joy!  You get out of the car and walk through the dark toward the light and YOUR amazing person walks back into your life.  It's like you're meeting them again for the first time.  You realize you don't know who was driving the bus and they could have ran the thing off the road and killed everyone.  You can't wait to hear her story.

The story is not all that long, but AMAZING!  She shares it in bits and pieces.  "Philadelphia was really cool!"  At Sights and Sounds Theatre, while watching the Joseph story from the bible, "they lifted him up above the stage during the dream parts by wire".  O.k, not long stories, but pretty incredible coming from a teenager who normally has to be prodded.

In the car you talk and ride through the darkness.  Everything bright and beautiful is punctuated in the darkness.  She falls asleep in the passenger seat after a twenty four hour day.  It feels amazing to be of service in a special way.  As a bonus, there are a couple of deer mulling around on a lawn in the middle of the city- someplace you'd normally never see them in the daylight hours.  

A car goes whizzing by very fast.  What?  A lone soul is walking the streets.  Are they heavy hearted?  Working toward a dream?  Sad? ______________?

On the highway a car goes by doing about ninety miles per hour.  Is this an epidemic?  What's the hurry? You roll down the window, but rather than shouting profanities, you listen to birdsong.

You decide to get off the highway and take the slow way home.  You decide to drive past your first apartment and your first home.  What a blessing to be able to revisit two such important mile markers on Memory Lane.

As you pull off the highway, the firmament (fancy name for sky from the bible in Genesis chapter 1) is amazing like Philadelphia.  You decide it would make a great scene in the movie you've been wanting to make.  It's Charles Dickensian behind the stark outlines of the new Schenectady Community College Dorms, if that's a word.  If not, who cares?

Pretty soon it will be 7:00 in the morning- your routine wake up time.  Pretty soon it will be time to rerise, put the coffee on and lace up your running shoes.  Part of you thinks about ditching the routine for the day, given your mid night excursion, but you decide not to.

You decide to run because lately you feel amazing.  You run because you're more alive then you've ever been.  You run because everything is going in the right direction and it feels good to battle the oncoming traffic of life.  For the first time in a long time you have PEACE.  For the first time in a long time something tells you everything is going to be more than fine.  For the first time in a long time you're not wondering if you're going to get a flat tire today or die of a stroke at 50.

We pull into the drive way and park.  I tell my daughter WE'RE HOME.  She forgoes a bowl of cereal before crashing.

Today, may you find joy in ordinary occurrences.  May you inflate your routine with something wonderful and sugary to your soul.  May you take time to reflect and renew.  May you rerise a thousand times today.  May you be a blessing to someone who least deserves it.  May you have a ....GOOD MORNING!