Fishing for Truth
But Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honor except in his own town and in his own home."
-Matthew 13:57
The night of the fourth of July, or the wee hours of the morning of the fifth, rather, I found myself suffering a bout of insomnia coupled with an urge to drive. Naturally, I had no idea as to my destination, but I hopped in my car and took the highway.
As if on autopilot, I found myself in the parking lot of the church where I grew up in Pasadena. Sunset United Methodist looked the same as it ever did in the dawn's soft glow. I waited until I saw a man arrive and waved hello.
He invited me into the Sunday school classroom for some coffee. The mural on the wall featuring a battle between angels and demons, some carrying folks up to heaven, others dragging people down into the fiery pit still made me feel just as unsettled as it had when I was a child and I'd go into the room with my grandmother for a cookie and some juice while she helped with the blood drive. When the rest of the class arrived I told them as much.
A few of them remembered my grandparents and my parents and even me as a child. I hadn't been there in years. I'd hoped to see my old choir director, but she was out of town. The man who'd initially invited me in mentioned that they'd recently gotten a new pastor, a younger man, whom he thought I would like.
He wasn't wrong. I sat in my own pew during the service in that half century old sanctuary and laughed audibly at his uncharacteristically irreverent joke about the virgin Mary's sex scandal as the jaws of all the old folks dropped and heads shook, but I observed a few half smiles and heard a chuckle here and there. Methodists are among the more liberal protestant denominations, but Sunset's congregation is mostly elderly.
The pastor went on to quote the verse from the top of the post, Matthew 13:57 and as I normally do on the rare occasion I end up at a church service these days, I felt as if he were speaking directly to me, like it was our own private joke between us and God.
The irony is that I was technically in my hometown. I'd moved to Cypress at age thirteen though. It was like a strange homecoming. There was a certain eerie dreamlike quality to the visit. The lack of sleep probably helped with that.
I rarely eat hot dogs, but after the service I joined in the luncheon where the pastor returned, dressed as Benjamin Franklin. I can't make this stuff up, y'all. It was definitely a trip. Still, I left the old church with the confidence that I'd ended up where I'd needed to be that morning and returned home.
My wanderlust got the better of me again a few weeks later, and I decided to go see my aunt in Cleveland. It was nearly dark by the time I reached her neck of the woods and I realized I didn't have her phone number or her address and couldn't remember how to get to her house, so I just kept driving.
I saw a sign for a radio station called the Eagle and tuned in all the way to Nacogdoches, where I pulled off at the lake and discovered the literal meaning of "starstruck." I laid on the hood of my car for a good hour staring up at the visible Milky Way, conversing with the heavens. I strummed my broken guitar and wrote a bit and just as I began to long for human contact, a man pulled into the lot with a small boat and a chihuahua. He invited me to go out on the lake with him and I happily agreed.
Stevie was his name and Taco his canine companion. We laughed at the coincidence and talked at length about life and politics. He told me I was smart and lamented the fact that I was younger than him. He asked me to guess his age. Without hesitation, I said, "You're forty-two."
'
His already wide eyes almost popped out of his skull. "Holy shit, are you psychic?" he asked. I told him not exactly, that it just figured.
Moments later, his fishing rod bent sharply and he reeled in a twenty-six inch bass. I took a photo of him holding her with his iPhone and asked what he planned to do with her. He said when he catches smaller ones, he'll sell them or cook them but this one he was going to let go.
"Oh no," he said. "She's died."
I almost wanted to cry and my face likely said as much.
"Don't worry," he said. "I'm gonna bring her back."
"What?" I wondered. "How?"
He said, "Watch this."
He tossed her back into the water where she floated limply for a few seconds as he seized a bright spotlight and shined it over her, back and forth and around in a circle until she suddenly reanimated and swam off into the green depths.
It was my turn for a holy shit moment, seeing as how the sequence of events in question directly mimicked the ending to the poem I'd written a few months previously. What. The. Fuck. Was this real life? Was I dreaming? Was I going crazy again?
Life is stranger than fiction, folks. Seriously. It's a long song. It's a poem. It's a dance. It's eternal and cyclical and the things that seem the most far-fetched tend to hold more truth than the things we're more apt to accept with supposedly concrete evidence and scientific method.
The truth is that you don't know anything until you know. How you find out depends on the path you take, how far you're willing to trust your own intuition and powers of deduction, as well as how far you're willing to literally travel to see where your path leads.
We are all capable of miracles if we only allow ourselves to believe in magic, indulge our inner children, hold onto that childlike sense of wonder and keep our minds open to the endless possibilities our universe has to offer. It's truly amazing.