A Sign for Every Season

"What is the one thing that has happened in your life that proves God's existence to you?"

My dad asked this question today at the kitchen table. Dad's always asking leading questions. In fact, I don't think I've ever received a piece of information from dad which wasn't exasperatingly coerced out of me by his bursting enthusiasm. Once I throw him the answer he wants, dad pounces on it like dog with his favorite toy.

It turns out that what dad wanted, in this rare case, was to give an answer, not get it. But before I tell you his answer, I have to tell you a little bit more about dad.

Dad's a little hysterical sometimes, about the most random things. About a month ago, he happened upon a website selling Solar Light Crosses. A week later we got Dad's $50 gizmo in the mail: a 2 ft tall white plastic cross with two rechargable batteries that never quite seem to work right.

A piece of junk, we all thought. All of us except Dad. Everynight he tried it out in a new location, in the planter, in the pool. Tonight I saw it, a glowing guardian, at the foot of my parent's bed.

It's been a month, and Dad's still just as enthusiastic. He wants me to start a business and sell them to my friends. He'd like to see it on every hill in America. What better symbol of Christ? he asks. "This is really going to freak people out. This is really going to proclaim the message of Christianity."

Mom and I exchange glances and shrug. Maybe he's onto something. And maybe he's not. Dad's got an awful lot of corpses in the graveyard of aborted brainstorms.

But today I saw that solar cross in a different light. Not the weird eerie white glow I usually see.

"What proves to you the existence of God?"

Dad grew up in deserty New Mexico. They have a reputation for seeing things in the sky. Some places in the world are like that.

Dad saw something once.

"I was nine. And Lorraine and I were on Grandma Refugio's porch. And all of a sudden we saw a shining white cross in the sky, as bright as the moon!! We called everyone out of the house and they saw it too! I couldn't believe it!!!!"

Dad hasn't had an easy life, to say the least. There are a lot of reasons he could have given up trying to get through one more day. But he doesn't. He knows God is real. He's seen the light of the cross, and it's effect on him is still as powerful today as it was when he was nine. And he wants everyone else to see it to.

I love my dad, and I love his cross, the literal and the figurative. And I'm learning to love the other crosses in my life. I don't know why God put me in the family he did, why he's given, and why he's taken away. But I'm learning to trust him.

"If any man come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. He who desires to save his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake will find it."

It's a season. A season, and a good one.