Clouds

Bows and flows of angel hair

and

ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons

everywhere

I've looked at clouds

that way.

Joni Mitchell

Ponce a wanna time, I once looked at clouds that way. Hidden deep in the tall grass in a meadow by the lake I'd lay in the sun. Lazy summer afternoons, one arm crooked behind my head, squinting, watching clouds roll by. There goes a rabbit. There goes a clown. There goes a rabbit chasing a clown. Maybe the clown would chase the rabbit. They were just clouds, puffs of white. Curious shapes drifting across the most gorgeous blue of the sky. They meant nothing more than that.

I spent the better part of my adulthood and all of my childhood wishing for the faith of my best friend, Mary Beth. We met when I was 4 turning 5, so that made her 3. I remember our first encounter. We met at the end of her driveway, located exactly five houses up the street from mine. I was sent to the store for bread or some other daily necessity and there she was. Standing at the end of the gravel, an only child. Did I want to play dolls with her? Are you kidding? Sure!! The only other friend I had was a boy, Jerry, who lived behind me. He and I played cowboys and Indians, or threw rocks into the woods. But Mary Beth wanted to play dolls! And so began one of the deepest and longest relationships I've had with anyone outside of my family.

We dressed up in our mother's old clothes. We played spies and Barbies and mud pies. We'd visit the neighbor and play her piano. Ocassionally we'd even lay in the grass and watch clouds together. Later when we'd play school, I found out something about Mary Beth that both drew me and left me empty. During *class* I'd write things like, *See Dick. See Jane. See Dick and Jane and Spot*. While she would write things like, *God loves me*. Over and over and over again. Coming the eldest from a brood of five I always wondered who that God was and why He didn't seem to love me. I was positive He certainly did love her. She said so.

Sometime around the end of middle school Mary Beth moved away. Four blocks! It was tragic! No more running a few feet at midnight to watch the stars in her backyard! No more tailgate sleepovers on the back of my parents beat up green station wagon! Who am I kidding. That's a lie. We adjusted to the move in a week and went on like there was no separation whatsoever. Except for one thing. She always seemed to know everything, everything, was going to be ok. Because God loved her. No matter what. While I used to lay in bed at night, afraid. Of everything. The night. The future. The silence of the present, there in bed, watching clouds float past the window and cover the face of the moon.

Looking back I can recall the faith of her father. His head bent in prayer, fingers entwined with rosary beads, kneeling at the side of his bed. I thought for years she had inherited it from him, much like the color of her hair. This faith that wasn't for me. Separated from it like candies displayed behind the thin glass pane of a candy shop. My hands and nose pressed to it's cold, eyeing all the goodies there. Just beyond my reach. I longed for the security it seemed to bring them, but eluded me. We'd all grown up Catholic, and Lord knows I'd been churched enough, schooled enough, lectured enough to have had some semblance of belief. But the truth was, I simply did not. And no matter how hard I *tried* to believe, I just didn't. I couldn't. I might have wondered and did alot of pretending, but I did not have the core conviction that there was a Man who had walked the earth, died and rose from the dead. Much as it might have been explained to me, I had no clue what the purpose of the whole fable was about to begin with.

Then one day, at 44, sitting in a lawn chair in my back yard, one leg dangling over the side as I watched the same clouds that had amused me as a child roll past, a thought occured to me. A simple thought really, but one I'd never had before. It was this. It rains when it needs to, and it stops when it's time. It never rains so much as to wipe us out. And the sky never withholds until we are in real trouble. It does this day by day, season in and season out. The balance is delicate and perfect. It works together with all the rest of nature. And that is when I knew like Mary Beth knows, it's too perfect to be random. This is no accident; it's not by chance. It cannot be. To float steadily in space, slightly askew, without a deluge to drown us as we mosey on our ways, there must be Someone responsible to see that the clouds do what they properly do to keep this old world spinning in it's fragile perfection.

And so suddenly clouds that were merely white wisps a few seconds ago weren't just rabbits and clowns anymore. Sitting up slowly from my comfortable slouch I saw them through new eyes. Glancing here and there, I saw also the perfection of my bearded iris, and the bizillion blades of grass that covered my lawn in a way I'd never noticed before. A breeze that lifted my hair wasn't just a casual happening. It was part of what keeps this place in perfect balance, along with the gravitational pull of the entire universe, to keep me from spinning off it. How did I miss what Mary Beth had known all along; had tried to tell me so many years ago, her brows knit with intent, bent writing in crayon over that old yellow lined paper?

Later that night, flipping through the bible I'd bought, a secret of the ages was revealed to me. On the pages of Romans it is written:

20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

There it was in black and white. God reveals Himself through nature. I'd been studying clouds all my life and had almost missed the most important thing they had to say to me. What a fool I'd been to not see it. My only excuse was that I eventually had fancied myself too sophisticated and educated to *buy it*. The fable. I had dismissed the miracles as ridiculous while watching them happen before my very eyes, day by day. It is a miracle when a baby is born. When a drop of rain feeds a plant that blooms a petal, that yields a fruit that feeds a child. Miracles that are so ordinary we fail to appreciate their brilliant significance. I can only say this in being humbled. Mary Beth was right. God loves her. And He does love me.. too.