Little Lights.

I've traded a place on a beautiful river for a spot in a condo development. This is a good place. Surprisingly quiet...which is in sharp contrast to the student apartments four or five blocks up the hill and down. Things are a bit more lively there!

One of the unexpected treasures of this place -there are almost always unexpected treasures wherever we are- is the fact that Fenbrook has no street lights for about one quarter of a mile. Fenbrook is the east-west road that our street "t's" into forty yards from our house. Walk down the sloping street we live on and you hit Fenbrook. You turn right and follow the sidewalk and, at night, the world is surprisingly dark.

There is a large yard behind a house to the right, just past a small woods, and there are often three or four deer in there. When they see you they look up and stare at you as if to say, "Who do you think you are staring at us?" If you stop you can hear the frogs down in a nearby pond. They sound like basses with an attitude. If you lean back, on a night like tonight, the stars seem close enough to touch. The darkness of the street allows them to shine.

The really cool thing about late June is that the woods, along the creek that runs along the south side of the street, are full of lightning bugs. (Are they the same as fireflies?) So in the woods there are these flashes of light going off and on. The pattern seems random. I remember reading that the bugs light up as some kind of way of attracting a mate. So the words, you might say, are full of love. Wondering if lightning bugs have speed-dating opportunities?

The dark of the woods seems as solid as mahogany. Impenetrable. Then, the little lights flash on and off...here and there...high in the trees and then down low to the ground. It makes me smile. And, after I stand there for awhile, it causes me to say, "There is a God."

Only God would put together a universe where something so silly, so delightful, so absolutely unnecessary, as lightning bugs would -at 11:27 at night- light up the woods along the creek.

Psalm 8 says that the heavens declare the majesty of God. There is something to be said for little lights.