Making Moments

This week I've been focusing on Making Moments. The book I use for to guide my devotions asks this week that I prayer that the moments of my life may themselves become prayers. Whether they are in the joy of a birthday party, in the weariness that comes from labor, in the majesty of the setting sun or in the pain that comes with tears. Pray that each in its turn will cause you to lift your voice to him.

Each day we're also given a selection for meditation. Today's was a story. Most of the time they are just profound thoughts someone like A.W. Tozer once said. I love those but today I realized something. God put something in me when I was born that just relates to stories - whether true or fiction. So often I feel a little less intelligent than my friends who don't read fiction because they prefer the intellectual musings of some great mind. This morning I realized that so often I only get the point if it's made through story. So, this morning, I got the point of making moments through this story. If you don't like stories - stop reading. If you do, read on, it's about kites and meeting Jesus with today in your eyes.

Well, I'm disappointed. Who wouldn't be? With socks, a Sunday School shirt, some handkerchiefs, a hand-me-down sweater and a year's subscription to a religious magazine for children. The Little Shepherd. It makes me boil. It really does.

My friend has a better haul. A sack of Satsumas, that's her best present. She is proudest, however, of a white wool shawl knitted by her married sister. But she "says" her favorite gift is the kite I built her. And it "is" very beautiful; though not as beautiful as the one she made me, which is blue and scattered with gold and green Good Conduct stars; moreover, my name is painted on it, "Buddy."

"Buddy, the wind is blowing."

The wind is blowing, and nothing will do till we've run to a pasture below the house where Queenie has scooted to bury her bone (and where, a winter hence, Queenie will be buried, too). There, plunging through the healthy waist-high grass, we unreel our kites, feel them twitching at the string like sky fish as they swim into the wind. Satisfied, sun-warmed, we sparwl in the grass and peel Satsumas and watch our kites cavort. Soon I forget the socks and hand-me-down sweater. I'm as happy as if we'd already won the fifty-thousand-dollar Grand Prize in that coffee-naming contest.

"My, how foolish I am!" my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. "You know what I've always thought?" she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but at a point beyond. "I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I'll wager it never happens. I'll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are" -her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone -"just what they've always been, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes."
~From A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote

That story taught me about what it means to make moments matter. I want to make moments that matter so much that I could leave today with them in my eyes.

Here's to kites and friends,
Joy