THE ORANGE BALL

I love it when God gives me a reality check. The other night when I was driving home from dinner at my mom’s I turned a corner and there, in a space between two banks of clouds was this startling sight—a huge orange ball! It took a few seconds before I came to realize that the ball was the moon. I honestly didn’t know at first what it was.

When I thought about it later, it scared me a little when I realized the reason I didn’t "get it" at first was because I get so much input from so many places that the moon was unrecognizable for what it is. It could have been a photograph or an advertisement for oranges or God knows what. It actually shocked me when I figured out just what it was.

For some reason I remembered being a soldier spending nights awake on guard duty. The moon, when it was visible was an object to contemplate. As a matter of fact, it was during my year in Vietnam that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren first set foot on the moon. That was inconceivable to me. It just seemed too far from my own reality to be possible.

But, at least then, the moon was the moon, the giant object lit by the light of the sun at night that circled our planet. Now the input I get has become so artificial in so many ways that I obviously have trouble distinguishing between what is real and what is not.

I can’t wait to once again live in a place on this planet where the night sky is again a part of my life—where the moon becomes, once again, just what it is.

I’m heading out west in a couple of days and I’ll catch up with you when I get there.