Levitating Pillows

       When I was a kid, I loved the top bunk. From that perfect pinnacle I could easily torture my sister. After the good-nights were said and the lights were off I wiggled, I hung over the edge and stared at her until she shrieked for me to stop, and I even dropped things. Best of all was having a jar of lightning bugs in bed with me. That glow of light flashing in the dark drove my sister to the brink on warm summer nights as I snickered from my perch near the ceiling.

            In broad daylight, however, my top bunk bed lost its charm. There isn’t a top bunk in the world that’s easy to make up in the morning, and mine was no exception. I’d crawl over the bed to straighten blankets, stand on the ladder to smooth out bumps, and balance on the frame of the bottom bed to pat pillows into place. One day that bunk bed put me on a spiritual collision course.

            I was up on top trying to make the bed when my pillow tumbled to the floor. How irritating! A trip down the ladder, again. “But wait,” I thought, “didn’t Jesus say if you have the faith of a grain of mustard seed . . . ?” I was all for praying and seeing answers. Wasn’t God all about answering prayers? So, we were a great duo, God and me. I would muster up faith as large as a mustard seed (something very small), and God would send the answer. So I screwed up my positive thinking and asked God to bring that pillow up to the top bunk. When nothing happened, I tried again, then again. The pillow never levitated, never even stirred. Finally, I climbed down, rescued the pillow, and plopped it up on the bed.

Apparently God wasn’t going to do for me what I could do myself. Or maybe something was wrong on my end. Maybe a mustard seed was bigger than it looked, or my faith was a much smaller commodity than I had thought. Something somewhere was wrong. I still remember staring down at that pillow on the floor. What I saw was much more than a pillow. I had just experienced my first collision of faith and reality. It wouldn’t be the last. That’s what this blog is about—an exploration of the mystery of faith in my life, the Christian’s life, and even the life of fictitious characters I’ve created in a novel who help me find my way in this real world where faith and experience seen to clash more often than I ever thought or would like.