Most Sundays that I am home, I sleep in as long as possible. But this Sunday had a mind of its own. A violent storm had raged through the night, and I hardly slept at all, which made me angry, as I needed rest after a two-week tour lecturing on theology. A little after six in the morning a strange silence—even more frightening than the storm—awakened me. I could feel the invisible war starting again. Although I had personally helped hundreds of people rise in their wars and find serious help, even victory, there was something unseen at work in my own life—dastardly evil that had a way of kicking my butt. I could see it coming like a dark cloud at sea moving toward me, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.
I knew sleep had vanished, so I decided to get up, throw on my khakis and a T-shirt, brew some coffee, and get the paper. I smiled thinking of how my wife, Mary, enjoyed real coffee—100% arabica, she would say—but I loathed waiting for it to brew. It pushed my impatience button, like when the meter on the gas pump suddenly slows to a crawl for the last few dollars when you have prepaid. I vowed long ago to never prepay for gas, simply because I hated that feeling of being hindered. Somehow hindrance summarized my life. How many times had I gotten on a roll in my search for answers only to feel some damnable, unknown parachute open and jerk me back?
The blue flashing light of the coffeemaker startled me out of my thoughts. I pushed the button to start the brewing and dashed out of the kitchen to get the paper. I couldn’t bear the insufferable wait. Wouldn’t it be great if you could text the coffeemaker and it would do the rest, and then it would text you when the coffee was ready?
As I turned the corner into the foyer, I expected to see our front door, but what I saw was as shocking as something from the book of Revelation and the wild visions of the Apostle John.
Strange lights are not unusual around our door. It has twenty-eight panes of beveled glass, and sometimes in the winter the bevels will catch the sunlight and create a few colors. But on this morning the light hitting the bevels created hundreds of flashing prisms, all moving and passing in and out of one another as if alive, generating a spectacle of dazzling light and color a few feet in front of me.
Ever since I was a boy, prisms have fascinated me, but I’ve never seen or even heard about multiple prisms coalescing to create a larger one. But that is exactly what appeared between me and my door. Pulsating with myriads of colors, rainbows within rainbows, it all mysteriously joined together into one living canopy. I stood still, mesmerized by the vision. And then the canopy started moving—toward me.
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