The bench in the shady front yard of my brother’s house in Matthews, NC, was hard. So was my line of thinking. The nearly twelve-hour drive the day before, in and out of storms, had left my brain slightly foggy. It was probably not the best condition in which to sit and ponder two grand topics.
Freedom and time. And how we take them both so much for granted.
It was, after all, the 4th of July, and in the distance, I could hear the crackle of strings of firecrackers being set off in the neighborhood. Occasionally a deeper boom would sound.
I wondered: why fireworks? Of all the things we could do to commemorate freedom, they seem an odd choice. Are they meant to harken back to the red glare of rockets? Are they to be benign bombs bursting in air? If so, I think we miss the connection. Maybe they’re just a dramatic woo-hoo moment to remind us of the preciousness of living in the land of the free.
Freedom is something I assume. It’s background. It’s so powerful, so grand, so abundant in our land, it’s like the great clouds of passenger pigeons that once darkened the skies of the Midwest. Untouchable. Un-derailable. Yet, as the plight of the pigeons should warn us, the cavalier loss of a few multiplied over and over can mean the loss of the whole. Even grand things can disappear with steady carelessness. Or with self-interested disregard.
But my thoughts today settled on a less ambitious, but no less difficult subject. Time. One thing visiting siblings can do is remind us of how precious a commodity time is. And how quickly it can be squandered.
As another home-ignited firework popped in the distance, I wished I had an inner pop that would sound every time something significant was happening. How great it would be to have something to snap my attention to focus on a moment that needed to be transformed into a memory.
What would life be like if we could catch all those precious proto-memories and incubate them?
I made an internal resolution to work on creating a way to stay, as a verse in Scripture reminded me, “alert and self-controlled.”
Later that night, as we waited for fireworks to start above the skyline of Charlotte, I realized that such an opportunity had arrived. Staying focused on the moment, I heard my brother share what he missed about his days playing principal trombone for the Charlotte Symphony, something I never thought to ask him about before.
And the next day, as we picked blackberries together in a downpour on the top of Crowder's Mountain, laughing at how drenched we were and how delightful the unexpected bounty was – black gold at the beginning of the rainbow, we imagined – we both realized we were framing up a story to be retold in the years to come.
Precious memories. Born in moments not taken for granted.
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