Sensory Overload

This afternoon I was waiting for a bus in Lausanne, coming home from work. It was twilight, and the sky was grudgingly giving back the last hints of blue as the rain and the night moved in, but the light through the clouds and onto the buildings was magical. As I stood in the rain I was listening to the Dave Barnes song, "Until You"... a song so beautiful that if you are in love, it will make you wonder if your heart is going to explode... and if you're not, it will chew you up and spit you out, full of some kind of eternal, painful, wonderful longing. Either way, it is so powerful and compelling that every time I listen the whole world slows and fades around me... "I need you, now and forever - just stay right here with me, don't ever leave. Love was kept from me, like a secret, and I swore that I was through.... until you". And then I realized that unlike the wet dog smell that so often seems to accompany rain on a busy city street, I caught a hint of watermelon. I don't know where it came from, but it was there, and it lingered, and for a minute it transformed that bus stop.

I was taken away, to that place where no rain, no late buses or crowded trains, no long day at work, no choices made or decisions pending could hide from me the beauty and the mystery that penetrate, so deeply, the world that my Father designed. What kind of hope, what kind of love, is this, that it can be alive in the setting sun on a red roof, the ring of a guitar behind a plaintive vocal, and the faint reminder of the freshness of summer? Amazing...