Angels

A small girl and her grandparents

Angels

A big black, extended cab, pickup truck was parked across the street when I pulled into the driveway.  Once parked, I released my seat belt, opened the door and stepped out onto the cold concrete.  But, it didn’t stay cold for long.

Three people crossed the street to greet me and their warm smile-filled greeting radiated warmth that seemed to flow through my body right into the cement I was standing on.  It also allowed me to immediately let go of the expectations I had mentally manufactured about this moment.  I had to laugh at myself.  Again!

A preconception is an idea that isn’t, “out there.”  It lives only in one’s mind.  And, in some ways, such ideas are also an amalgamation of personal experience.  The interesting thing is that personal experience is never fixed.  It continually changes and grows.  It is dynamic.  That means our personal ideas are constantly challenged.  I call this, the principle of “Dynamic Contest.”

The principal of Dynamic Contest simply means that the longer a person lives, the more their ideas about living are questioned.  And, it doesn’t ever end, no matter the length of a person’s life.  There seems to be an infinite number of lessons a person can learn throughout a lifetime and it can make life seem to be a continual battle or endless wonder.  And, we all get to choose.

We can choose to see everyone else in the world as wrong.  Or, we can choose to anticipate wonder around every corner.

I wonder at the human ability to create beauty.  I saw pictures of a new u-shaped sky scraper being built in Manhattan a couple of days ago.  It is an engineering and visual marvel that had never entered my mind before its vision on a computer screen expanded my mind.

I wondered at new combinations of flavors and tastes that blew my mind while perusing new recipes to attempt on my smoking grill.  New ideas to combine salt, sweet, savor and spice I would never have considered were all presented to introduce me into a culinary world I’d never dreamt about.

And now, I was standing on a cold driveway that seemed to be melting right along with my heart.  A big black, extended cab, pickup truck was parked across the street when I pulled into that driveway.  But, it didn’t stay cold for long.

Three people crossed the street to greet me and their warm smile-filled greeting radiated warmth that seemed to flow through my body right into the cement I was standing on.  It also allowed me to immediately let go of the expectations I had mentally manufactured about this moment.  I had to laugh at myself.  Again!

Two loving and caring grandparents walked toward me with their granddaughter.  They were all holding hands and smiling.  Of course, the grandparents referred their little one as their “Angel.”  “Because, it took us a long time to be able to adopt her,” Sandra Harkins explained. 

“Angels!”  I said to myself as I laughed inside.  “Sandra and John Harkins don’t look like any angels I had ever envisioned before.  They’re far more glorious than I could have ever created in my own mind!”