God Lives in the Midwest!

...Oh well, I said that to get your attention, just so you would look at the pictures I posted.

Relax. God lives everywhere - in the Midwest, in India, in Antartica, in my toffee-nosed suburb, in the ghettoes, in Las Vegas (Sin City), for God's sake!! We often wonder - why did this happen? Or - how could this injustice or perversion have taken place??? How do we uproot this evil and prevent it from happening again? If indeed God lived in that place, then He would certainly have prevented that crime from occuring there! No, that's where evil has taken root and we need to weed it out! And so we go on in this demented fashion (increasingly, of late)...a sign of the slipping of our 21st century global civilization into the gutter perhaps.

But we forget that even that which is 'evil' or unnatural is a part of the divine plan to kick us towards spiritual evolution. This mortal life is after all just a temporary one, a brief second in time. We really should stop being hampered by the material and the here and now, and view our global network of humanity from a 10,000 foot perpective. Of late, we seem to be devolving into primal and blindly instinctive beings who react out of need and insecurity amidst consumerism and instant gratification. Not saying any of that is wrong either - as a suburban housewife, I'll be the first one to defend retail therapy...but only for the right reasons. Just saying that we create much unhappiness and then look for convenient targets to plant the blame on - perhaps one could say, ahem, that "we have found the enemy and it is us".

Unquestionably, our imagination is woefully inadequate in assessing the might and extent of His presence, as Hamlet states - "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (Act 1, Scene 5). I think one can spend a lifetime analyzing this line (in one's free time, of course...who would mull over shades of meaning in order to find nirvana...although this would appear a most gratifying pursuit to most devotees of Literature, like me).

I don't have the capacity to comprehend His power, but I do catch glimpses of it now and then when driving around the Midwest.

And I have my breath knocked out of me when I do.

It takes me a while to pick up my pieces and fumble around to seize the moment on my trusty digital camera (for which I give thanks - the camera and the dexterity, that is).  So. Here are some of those moments during which His beauty and grace tell me that we are going to be ok:



As you can see, it takes very little for me to go into a reverie, lol!