Shooting Star

I just stepped out of Starbucks, looked up at the twilight sky, and watched a meteor streak from the deep blue canopy of sky above toward the still-warm horizon and vanish. Larger and brighter than any other stars or planets in our night sky, it lasted barely long enough for me to hold my breath. Beautiful.

Royal Flush

A  friend recently posted on Facebook that his daughter's fish had died. She wanted to bury it at the beach, but since they don't live there, he was contemplating whether temporary storage in their freezer might be a solution.

This reminded me of college. My roommate/best friend and I had an aquarium where we kept black mollies and red swordtails. When fish died, she and I held flushing funerals—the dorm equivalent to a burial at sea.

Photo by Richard Chambers, 

available under the Creative Commons 

Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

At this time, we lived in an all girls dorm, but our floor had urinals in the bathrooms as well. We always took the newly deceased to a toilet stall, flushed, and gave a sad impression and a farewell to the fish as it swirled around the bowl and made it's final flourish of an exit to the watery abyss beyond the porcelain.

Then one day our male swordtail died, so we decided to be gender correct and use one of the urinals. We emptied our net of the remains, said our peace, and then pulled the silver handle. We expected a long goodbye like our previous experiences with the ladies' bowl, but that fish departed with a liquid equivalent of the Chernobyl blast. A sudden, giant WHOOSH erupted, not unlike the force of an industrial strength pressure washer, and that fish was gone. I mean vanished. We jumped back from the urinal both in shock and to avoid the after-spray of water and scales. We'd been robbed of our peaceful goodbye and startled out of our wits, and as a result we committed the ultimate funeral faux pas--we laughed.

Moral of this story? When in doubt, flush first.

Chips and Salt and Light

© Pontuse | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

Have you ever noticed that the chips at the top of the bag are pretty and whole and just about perfect to look at, but the broken chips at the bottom are the saltiest? I think it's the same with people. 

Jesus tells us that we're supposed to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 15:13-16). We get so caught up in wanting to be whole, wanting to look and feel perfect--not flawed and broken and messed up--wanting to hang on to youth, beauty, health. But the truth is that the saltiest individuals are those who've taken that rough trip to bottom of the bag, been beaten up a bit by time and handling. Yes, those painful life experiences and heart wounds really hurt on the way down, but Jesus uses them to give the world a potent taste of His grace.

Just like those last broken bits that leave your fingers coated with salt crystals, those who are saltiest for God's kingdom are those who've been broken.