We teach our children to share. Their Monday/Tuesday flu became my Thursday flu.  I was at a meeting on Wednesday night and knew that something wasn’t right.  By the time I got home, I was shivering like a native Floridian in an Indianapolis winter.  There was no need to deliberate. Our children shared the influenza virus with ol’ dad.

There are many bad things about being sick.  For a person trying to get things done, what with my checklists and sense of mission, the sudden involuntary incapacitance bugs me.  However, for a person trying to get things done… checklists… mission… the forced rest has its privileges.

Here’s what’s weird.  When I have a fever, I have awesome dreams.  Joyful dreams.  Lego™ dreams.  I call them Lego™ dreams because, in this state, I can suggest to my brain “what if the roads were made of cheese instead of old records?” and my brain will make it so*.  It’s pretty awesome and it scares my children.

I am reminded of how creative God is.  He has created us in His image, which includes the desire to create, to make, to express.  Life could be so boring and we wouldn’t know any better. But that’s not what God is like.  He’s creative.  He’s joyful.  There are glimpses of His glory in those moments in my mind.  I don’t think it’s the fever as much as it is the slowing down.

No wonder He keeps telling us to take a break — a sabbath.  True joy is in the release of self-inflicted importance.

I write all of this as I consider the moon rise I saw last night.  There she was, orange and curtained by the clouds.  A perfect, lesser light to govern the night.  The moon would never quite look like that again — that same angle, cloud composure, color of the horizon, sounds of traffic, a train pulling south.  Tonight, God will create another moonrise over our miscellaneous, an overwhelming display of divine creativity for our bored souls.

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*Copyright, Jean-Luc Picard.  All Rights Reserved.