It’s funny how the universe drops little jewels of joy and uplifting in the path of your life now and then, treasures unawares, if I might modify that phrase a bit.
I had several jewels dropped into my path today ~ sown last night, when we lent our car to one of my daughters, after she’d come out of work to find one of the tires on her car flat. Out of that less than positive happenstance, as with jewels taken from the dirt and stone in which they’re formed, came these three treasures ~
1.) I got to spend half an hour talking with Brigette about things that are important to us, as well as just chatting, when she picked me up on her way back to work so I could get my car;
2.) talking with her about the seminar I’m going to in Ontario this weekend and enumerating the ways that I know I’m meant to go to this seminar, helped to calm my heart and worries that the check I’m waiting for won’t come in time for us to go, and
3.) but, this, the most complex and multifaceted of the treasures I received takes longer to explain.
Brigette had left the radio on what I think was a christian station she listens to. The news program was interesting, but when I went to push the button to find out what station it was, I accidentally hit one of the programmed buttons instead, so I had to search through to find the station again ~ I’m not sure if I found the right one, because the newscast had just been ending when I hit the wrong button, and when I got back to a christian station, the second or third one the scanner stopped at, there was a young woman speaking about how she’d reached out to Jesus when she was 9 and felt him take her hand as she sat on the back of a horse. Of course the word “horse” caught my attention, and even though I’m not religious, I am a person of faith, and what little I’d heard touched my heart, so I continued to listen.
The young woman’s parents had died (I don’t know how) when she was only 9, and her life seemed to have crashed down around her and, just as my heart called out to my angels several months ago, in her grief and pain she had cried out the only name she knew, even though she’d only ever been to church once or twice in her life ~ Jesus. She said that in that moment she had felt him take her hand and he had never left her since.
As I drove to the store before I went home, I continued to listen, and it turned out that the young woman and her husband were guests on the radio show, which I later discovered was Focus on the Family. The couple’s names are Kim and Troy Meeder (I looked them up on the Focus On the Family website), and they are the founders, owners, operators of Crystal Peaks Youth Ranch, in Bend, Oregon ~ where they have helped thousands of “broken” children find healing by working with the horses the Meeders have also rescued and helped to heal.
Listening to them talk about how they built Crystal Peaks from a plot of land that had been scraped raw and mined for cinders to spread on the roads, 8 acres of land that had no grass or trees or even dirt when they started (which was how they could afford it in the first place), I was struck by how obvious it was that, in healing that piece of land, they were learning patience, growing in faith and belief, and preparing themselves for the next great work of rescuing “broken” children and horses who, within that same love and belief, though they were unaware of it, would help to heal each other.
It was a beautiful story, and one that speaks to me of the best uses of one’s faith. As I listened, there were points at which I felt the flush-and-goosebumps feeling that I associate with being in contact with the divine, whether you call it the cosmos, or the universe, or god, or the holy spirit ~ it is an in-flooding and an up-welling of love and belief that refreshes and re-energizes, as true love and belief always do.
It was a gift to me, carried on the joy in the voices of these two people as they talked about the children and horses they had brought together and helped to find healing.
It was one of the jewels dropped in my path today, and I wanted to share it, knowing that even in giving it to you, the gift stays with me still. For, as some of the oldest texts of faith, the Upanishads, tell us, the abundance of the universe cannot be reduced, no matter how much of it is taken or given away.
“From abundance he took (received) abundance ~ and still abundance remained.”
May you live and love in the abundance of divine energy that vibrates through and around us all.
