O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence - as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil.

-Isaiah 64: 1-9

Draw near to God and God will draw near to you.

- James 4:8

They say a watched pot never boils.  Well, that's not exactly true. But true enough that the saying holds and we know exactly what it means!

From the time I was a little girl, my family would go on a camping trip.  We'd go to this or that mountain range or up north to where it seems there's more lakes than land.  Every year I'd watch for them: the Northern Lights.  Then it was with my own family the trips continued. And also the watching and waiting. How many times I searched the sky for them in the likely places - Wyoming, Montana, Minnesota, the UP of Michigan - I've lost count.  I hoped, I waited, I watched, but never any eerie lights sighted.

Then about five years ago, just as winter was announcing it's impending arrival, I was coming home after a late-night gathering of friends.  I turned off the busy road and into our neighborhood off the busy road. I could feel it right away.  Something was awry.  It raised the hair on my neck and set my teeth on edge.  There was strangeness in the air.  And in the distant sky.  I turned into my driveway and noticed to the north and west the sky moved red and orange. Fire? It became more intense.  Fermilab?  No, it was far away, yet becoming so intense.  Almost like the sky was dancing in the distance.  Milwaukee was burning???  I mean REALLY burning.  Like someone had dropped a bomb or a nuclear power plant melt-down.  The clear night sky danced and blazed.  I feared I might be seeing it for the last time.  That our doom was near!

Then all of a sudden the sky shifted and I was seeing green. Which was when it dawned on my and I rejoiced: The Northern Lights!  I ran inside, woke Curt and for the longest while we stood together in our driveway, in Warrenville, Illinois, the most unlikely of places, and watched the Lights dance and shimmer.

And now another unlikely sighting just this week.

Wednesday afternoon I pulled into the driveway and had the same eerie feeling.  There were hundreds of starlings.  Unsettled and unsettling.  Swarming. Gathering in my trees and squawking like crazy.  I paused and took it all in, wondering what had stirred them so.  Then a strange sound I'd never before heard.

Though I'd read about it.  For years I've thought of going to see the sandhill cranes.  Sandhills are some of the largest birds in North America.  Three and a half feet high and a 7-foot wing span.  And they're one of the oldest known species of birds - at least 10 million years old.  You can see them in December in New Mexico, about 100 miles south of Albuquerque.  They gather by the thousands in Kearney, Nebraska the last two weeks of March, and it's there they engage in their famous courtship ritual dancing.  Their loud trumpeting call suggests a French-style "r" rolled in the throat.  They can be heard from a long distance, calling.    I've been plotting how I might glimpse them for years.

I was trying to get a read on what had stirred up those starlings and now strangely raising the hair on my neck.  Then I heard it far off.  I raised my eyes and saw hundreds of them flying in smaller groups, all in formation, their straight long necks pointed south, wide wings spread, steady flapping.  From my driveway, sandhill cranes!

To think, all of the places I've roamed and searched - or longed to - for a Holy Encounter, and my driveway ends up being the holy ground.  Who would have guessed?

I'm thankful for eyes, ears, hearts and hair on the back of our necks that search and long for his coming.  Let yours be tuned for such.  May the Holy One find you on the holy ground of your life.  And may you know that you have been found. 

Advent blessings,

Denise