I could sing of your love forever...Lord. I could sing of your love, f o r e v e r. . .
Even though I heard these words a week ago, it took a while for my inspiration to truly seep in and marinate my heart. I heard these words on a sunny Sunday morning around 10 30 am, with a live band in front of me and a makeshift choir behind me. I was in the center of a mass, but since that usually connotates Catholicism, I would like to clarify and state that I was in the center of a Presbyterian church gathering on a sunny Sunday morning just seven days ago. What I learned then, I will always remember.
The pastor told a story. It was about a lesson he learned from a faucet, termites, and ants. He noticed one day, while about to fall asleep, that the faucet was leaking. Tap, tap, tap the water went...each night.. He noticed it, but chose to ignore it. After a few months, he noticed his water bill spiked a bit. Some other time afterwards, he was cooking in the kitchen when he leaned against a wall and it cracked. He didn't want to do anything about it. A few weeks later, he noticed termites crawling up and down, eating away his walls and creating a giant hole. ..And lastly, ants were starting to creep around his house.He decided to go to the hardware store to buy a new knob for the faucet, which took him only an hour to repair. He bought drywall and wood to reconstruct the part of the wall, taking him only one day's worth of work for the entire wall that the termites ate. And he bought ant repellent for the ants, which took a few minutes, tracking them all back to the single Queen ant who produced them all (by the way, fun fact: for each human, there are one million ants on earth).
What was the lesson, he asked? After all of the damage that accumulated over time, he realized he could have had short, quick, simple solutions and would have saved a lot of money, time, and gross-ness. Why is it so hard to simply hold ourselves accountable? Why don't we clean up our crumbs? ..I was at the right place at the right time when I heard the pastor tell this story because it inspired me to vacuum at 11 o clock at night today after I dropped crumbs of graham crackers all over the sofa.
Next. It was Saturday night--the night before I was making fantasy plans in my head about going to church one day. I told my roommate to come if she wanted, that I was going to go to church on Sunday. Somehow I started explaining the three Abrahamic faiths to her--Christianity, Judaism, and Islam--and what they all share in common. About how Abraham's story is universally accepted--God gave him and Sarah the ability to bear children at old age. God tested him. God and Abraham-a story surpassing the confines of scrolls.
Little did I realize that I was yet again at the right place at the right time. The pastor talked about Abraham the very next morning at church. Hello, the universe called. It was asking you to be at the right place at the right time. Thank you, good bye. ?!?!
Okay, now this one tops them all. It was as if the whispers of all the energies in my head somehow sprinkled dust into the mind of the pastor. When he said, "..and sometimes, God speaks to you. In different ways. Sometimes he speaks to you through a dream, sometimes through other people, or sometimes just by chance." That was really, really spooky. I can't believe it. This whole time I was thinking about how the universe finds a way to put you at the right place and right time (Oprah had said it this way before) and yet, the very theory that I thought I had minted, was ejecting out of the mouth of this pastor.
It was the perfect Sunday for me to go to church.
