Why is it that sometimes we don’t truly appreciate something until we are about to lose it?
I’m moving.
I don’t want to move, but I have to move. The most difficult part is I’m moving into limbo. It’s different when you are moving and you definitively can see where you are going to land. Yet, this time, for some reason, God is seriously up to something. I just wish he’d let me in on it. But then what would we need faith for.
When I first moved in several years ago I noticed how hot it would get in my bedroom late in the day since it faces the west. And living in far Southwest Florida, there’s never really a break in the heat. One day I saw on Craigslist a lady that was selling these heat-blocking curtains.
Brilliant, I thought. I’ll just hang up these heat and light-blocking curtains and save lots on my electric bill every single month. And I did. It was funny if you had the curtains open, the room would heat up quickly. But because of how thick and stiff they were it was difficult to get them to slide open letting the light in. They would sort of close on their own, not in a creepy “Grandma? Is that you?” kind of way. Just law of nature.
I have to say, for those days you wanted to sleep in, the dark curtains of doom kept every ounce of light out. You’d wake up at 10 am thinking it was 6! It was also good for those afternoon naps.
As I started to pack my life in an assorted array of boxes, which I’m still in the middle of and only one more day to go. I took down the curtains first. I had become so accustomed to the dark, that having all that light spill into my room surprised me. But it was more than that. The other night was a full moon and I woke up somewhere in the night with this gorgeous moonlight dancing across my bed and my face. I rolled to my stomach and gazed out the window at the beauty of it for a long time.
Then every night at dusk, just as the sun disappears over the palm trees from my second-floor room, the sky suddenly floods with a Monet landscape of color. Tonight it was so beautiful I stopped all I was doing and plopped across the bed again gazing out in admiration. And I was suddenly overcome with stings of regret. Why didn’t I take those stupid curtains down long ago? I never realized all I was missing.
And isn’t that how it always is?
You will have something amazing right there before you but still, miss it somehow. We try to make everything practical and we like things to make sense. But one day the light floods in and you see it all clearly. And you see the magic that was right there with you all along, but you couldn’t see it in the dark.
Wherever God has me land next I know a few things for certain. I’ll pay the damn extra $20 bucks a month in electric and not miss a moment of the magic. And I’ll open my eyes wider this next time and see all the gifts I have right there before me instead of waiting to appreciate it only when it’s all about to go away.
“She used to tell me that a full moon was when mysterious things happen and wishes come true.”
? Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow