Coat Pockets

Much to my dismay, it is now jacket/coat season where I live.  Sure, the changing of seasons is kind of fun, and Fall is a very pretty time of year.  Colder weather means football and Halloween and football and Thanksgiving and football, all of which I enjoy (especially football).  Sadly, it also means defrosting the car and shoveling the drive and being cold, which I do not enjoy.  I am not a big fan of being cold and I would rather sweat than freeze.  However, since I cannot stop the earth from rotating and for some reason cannot convince my significant other that life in Southern California would be oh so wonderful, I have broken out the coats.

The advent of coat season brings with it a few surprises.  I have a habit of sticking things in my pockets and each year I discover all sorts of little treasures that have been tucked away for the last six months.  Before you ask, no, I never seem to find any money (stupid wallet).  However, my heavy winter coat yielded an amazing variety of stuff this past week.  First, there was the wrapper from a candy bar (chocolate!!!).  Then two of my wife's pay stubs (no clue how those got there), some napkins from a fast food restaurant, a receipt from a different fast food restaurant, a pen (which never seems to be around when I really need it) and another receipt, this one from a gas station.

While not quite as exciting or relevant as, say, the opening of King Tut's tomb, the contents of my coat pocket allow me the opportunity to play a little game I like to call "Where and when did this come from?"  Looking at the dates on the receipt is permitted but comes with a mandatory reduction in style points.  There are, however, serious bonus points available if I can remember not only what restaurant the napkins came from but when I went there and what I had to eat.  Believe it or not there have been occasions in which I could reconstruct an entire Thursday afternoon in February based solely on the items found in my coat pocket.  This is all the more remarkable considering that I can't often remember what I had for lunch three days ago.

Once the initial thrill of discovery is over (usually the euphoria wears off in about 30-45 seconds) I find myself feeling a bit melancholy.  Last winter I wore my coat pretty much all the time, which means I had it on at least 100 days.  Most of those days were average, ordinary, unremarkable.  Just another day in the life of me.  And what do I have to show for them, what evidence of the 2400 hours I walked the face of this earth?  A couple of receipts proving that I consumed some incredibly unhealthy food and bought some gasoline for my car.  Oh, and that my wife went to work for a couple of weeks in January and and got paid for her time and energy.  That's it.

Granted, my life cannot and should not be reduced to the contents of my winter coat pockets.  Yet, my coat pockets remind me of how much of my life seems to be lost in the day-to-day grind of just living.  I have a friend who will tell you that today is the best day of his life.  I have no reason to doubt him when he says it.  I wish I had the same approach to living.  Instead, the vast majority of my days are spent doing the basics of life - eating, sleeping, working, eating, parenting, being a spouse - not really noticing what I am doing and wondering if anybody else is paying attention either.

Scientists tell us that our universe is billions of years old and that there are hundreds of billions of stars and planets out there in space.  As a human being, I get to live on one of these planets for a tiny fraction of time, not even a blink of the proverbial eye.  How in the world can anything I do matter?  What difference does it make?  Even if you accept the butterfly in the Amazon flapping its wings and making it rain in Texas theory (which I do because it just sounds so cool) in a universe as massive as ours can I say or do anything that will have any influence?

I really want to be able to tell you something uplifting here, that each day is a gift (that is why they call it the present) and that we should value every second we are alive.  I really, honestly do.  Yet, I know that for many of us Tuesday morning will come and we will go off to work, our kids to school, and we will come home and have dinner and three weeks from now we probably won't remember any of it.  The day will come and go and no one will really care what we said or did - not our grandchildren, or their children or the people that write history books about famous people and their remarkable accomplishments.  No one, except God.

See, I think that the present is a gift not just for us but also for God.  It took billions of years to get to this point, for the universe to evolve so human life can exist.  How long will it last?  Who knows.  But I am sure that God savors each and every moment of it.  Our mundane lives are anything but pointless and boring to the One who waited so long for the chance to see us live and breath and eat and pray and love and work.  Our lives are so short that I don't think we appreciate how long God has been anticipating and working for this moment.  After billions of years of waiting, I honestly can't imagine God missing out on a single second of our lives.  All those minutes and hours and days and weeks of our lives that got lost because they are just ordinary, average days, are not lost to God.

So, as you are taking out the trash this week, or making coffee, or typing up that report, or doing anything that you do day after day, week after week, remember how long God has been waiting to see you do it.  Maybe, just maybe, that makes even the most average of days seem a little more extraordinary.  Even the trips to get gas in the middle of winter.