Airplanes and shooting stars

Two nights in a row around midnight I reluctantly take my dog Rocky out for a walk, it's cold and I'm exhausted from being on my feet all day at work. But I've taken the time to have a conversation with God, nothing too big or special, just a conversation. At a point in the conversation I stop looking down at my feet and start to gaze into the infinite abyss of a dark canvass of a sky and just look at the perfectly clear starry night. I think to myself how often we spend life looking at our feet and talking about our problems or struggles and how we rarely just stop talking and sit in silence and just be in awe of creation.

And the moment I stop looking down and I look up, mid conversation, I see a shooting star.

What is so special about a shooting star?

Is it because it's rare?

Because they aren't really rare, it's just rare when we see them.

It's rare for us to stop looking down at our own lives and look up to the sky. It's rare to just STOP our busy lives for a moment.

But we love when we see shooting stars because we are usually in a place when we can just stop and be. Maybe we are sitting around a campfire, listening to the crashing waves on the beach in the darkness of night, at a Rascal Flats concert with your best friend, or maybe we are sitting in Africa or Cambodia just having a hard night and struggling through things and we don't have any other option except to just look up, because we are desperate to experience something more than ourselves.

Seeing a shooting star is rare, but not because the stars are rare, because when we look up and surrender the busyness of life, it's rare and then we see a glimpse of light flash across the night sky and we are reminded that we are not alone, that there is an entire universe outside of ourselves and we become thankful that we took that very moment to look up and that we didn't miss it.

It's why famous music artists sing about pretending that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars, because we can all use a wish right now.

Or maybe we can all use a minute to just stop what we are doing and look up, and see something special that takes our breath away no matter how many times we've seen it before, it's always different and it's always beautiful.