Like a Bloodhound

A few years ago, I had a profound experience. My life was pretty much chaos, but I was helping a friend move, and when I went outside to take a smoke break, something happened to me. As I was leaning against my car in the late February sunshine, I was overwhelmed with the knowledge that something wonderful would happen to me before the end of the year. I was fairly confident that I would finally meet my dream guy. Sounds silly, I know, but it was so overwhelming that my friend, looking out the window to see how much cigarette I had left, noticed something about me and came out to make sure I was okay. I was told I looked like I’d had a religious experience. I guess I had.

Six months later, while visiting a friend who lived out of state, I told her that I felt like I was about to meet the man of my dreams, that I felt like if I could only turn around fast enough, I’d see him over my shoulder – this man who’d haunted me since I was 3. When I got home from that trip, in my inbox were some responses to an online personal ad I’d placed several weeks earlier. I’d pretty much given up hope of meeting anyone that way though. Most of the emails contained nothing more than name, rank, and serial number type stuff, pretty typical, but one letter in particular stood out. The writer of that letter is now my husband. Yes, he is the man I’d dreamt of for 30 years. Neither of us can explain where the dreams came from or how they could be so accurate. We just know they were. We like to believe it was God.

Since then I’ve had other "experiences." Actually, my life has been filled with them since I was a child. I don’t know what to call them. I am not a believer in so-called psychic phenomena. For lack of a better term, I refer to them as my instincts (although I believe it goes my deeper than that) and I like to say that my instincts have never let me down while I have often failed them. Many times, to my everlasting regret, I have not listened to my instincts. I could have saved myself a lot of grief if I had.

Needless to say, when such experiences happen, I have learned to take notice. After so many years you learn how to recognize them, you just understand the familiarity of the feeling. And it’s impossible to explain. It’s sort of like childbirth – unless you’ve gone through it, you just won’t relate. And that’s okay. I no longer expect anyone else to get it.

And I only mention these things because I had one such experience this morning, as I was going to sleep for the second time. I try to pray at night as I lay in bed. It calms me, keeps my brain from thinking about all the things I forgot to do, need to do, want to do, wish I’d done, wish I could forget … you get the idea. I once heard a pastor describe bedtime prayer as falling asleep in the arms of Jesus and I thought that was a beautiful description. Whatever the reason, it works for me. So this morning the thought, unbidden, popped into my head, "I am on the verge of something profound." Well, that’ll wake you up! Profound how? Spiritually? Emotionally? Financially? I don’t know. So I feel like a bloodhound, sniffing around for the scent, zig-zagging back and forth trying to track down the essence of the trail. Where does it start? Where’s it going? What does it mean? I know I’m on to something, I just don’t know what the something is. I do know though that tracking it down is somehow part of the exercise. And I know in my bones that this is a good thing, just like I knew all those years ago that something good would happen to me before the end of that year. It’s exciting and nerve wracking at the same time. I don’t know how some people, myself included, just know things sometimes. For me, I only know that I do, and when I know it, I know it, I am convicted by it and committed to it. So I know something good will happen to me before the end of the year. It’s sort of like being a kid at Christmas, when you’re still too young to tell time, and the grownups around you will only say, "Soon, soon … "

Until then, I’ll continue to try to sniff it out.